Tomorrow night at 7:30 I’m doing a reading downtown as part of the USC Master of Professional Writing program reading series. The reading is in a bar, so in the fine tradition of Charles Bukowski and any number of Irish poets, I have high hopes for this. The bar’s website (the URL of which is unfortunately wrong on the flyer, by the way — it’s actually www.themountainbar.com) promises “bleeding walls,” which is something I last saw in a Takashi Miike movie. I think if they were to bleed while I was reading, I would find that distracting. Anyway, please join us for this. Previous student readings have been fantastic, and hey, drinks are available. The address is 475 Gin Ling Way, and no, I have no idea where that is either, but that’s why we have mapping technology.

My friend EM Lewis’ terrific new play, “Song of Extinction” is currently running at the John Anson Ford Amphitheatre’s Inside the Ford venue in a production by Moving Arts. Ellen (that’s what some of us call her) is a gifted playwright and I’m proud to say this play was written in my workshop. The production is populated with theatre friends I’ve worked with for many years, every one of them fiercely talented — so I’m going to take the risk of vouching for this sight unseen. But hey, why don’t you be the judge? This Sunday at 5, I’ll be moderating a post-show discussion with the playwright, and the producer (another longtime theatre ally, Kim Glann), is offering a 20% discount to readers of this blog; just enter the promotion code SONG when you click here to RSVP. And students with ID are $12, so yes, USC student, this means YOU should come join us. Ellen is a graduate of that program of ours.

“Flat is the new up.”

I heard that tonight when a friend and I attended a business lecture at UCLA by Norm Brodsky and Bo Burlingham, co-authors of the terrific new book “The Knack.” Where did they hear it? From entrepreneurs at the recent Inc. 500 conference.

In other words, forget growing during this economy; if you’re able to stay flat, you’re ahead.

Which makes me think of news I read on my iPhone while I was waiting for the lecture to start: Evidently, Congress is balking at even discussing a bailout for Detroit auto manufacturers. For GM in particular, “flat” will mean death — they’ve had so much shrinkage they’ve been underwater for decades. On top of that, the other day I heard this statistic: GM has 20% of auto sales in the U.S., and Toyota has 20% of auto sales in the U.S. GM has 7000 dealerships; Toyota has 1500. GM has all the operational efficiency of an overstuffed jelly donut.

Even with the estimated 2.5 million jobs to be lost, it’s tempting indeed to let them go out of business. (Or declare bankruptcy, learn from their lesson, and see if they can become profitable in a reorganization — and perhaps learn how to sell a car at the same time.)

Saturday night I went to see some friends in a play and found myself utterly mesmerized watching the Three Stooges video playing on the set of their show prior to curtain. My two companions wouldn’t admit to watching, let alone enjoying, the Stooges (and, indeed, one of them sniffed, “I don’t think I could even name one of them.”). But I love The Three Stooges (all six of them, to varying degrees).

And so, I give you this, sent to me by my father-in-law. Before clicking, please take into account my personal sensibility as noted above.

Don’t know how I missed this the first time around, but now that I’ve seen it, I love it. The sound and the look. So here it is.

They’ve finally ruled out the grassy knoll.

(Or is that just what they’re telling us?)

The other night one of my grad students offered me goldfish crackers. Although I didn’t want any (and it was kind of her to offer), I took the bag to read the label.

Someone else thought I was reading the label to check the calories or the fat content, and said so.

“That’s not what I’m looking for,” I said.

And right away another student said, “Are you looking to see if it has corn products in it?”

I was. And then he and I were off — sidetracking the class into five minute mini-lectures on the abuse to the environment and the food chain that is forced corn feeding, to animals, and to humans. I could link to thousands of articles on the subject, but won’t (you can just Google “High Fructose Corn Syrup” to start, and you’re off and running); instead, I’ll just let you know that I’m one of these people written about recently in the LA Times: a conscientious shopper who reads labels and does everything possible not to buy HFCS products. As I told my class, when I was a kid I ate my fair share of fast food and I guzzled innumerable Mountain Dews and got as little exercise as possible outside reading comic books, and kids today with similar behavior patterns are gaining prodigious weight where I never did. The difference? Now 85% of our food includes corn, and it’s a direct result of U.S. government policies begun in the 1970’s by Agriculture Secretary Earl Butz. Yes — and I know how this sounds — all that corn you’re eating is the result of a government plot.

But bear with me.

I just finished helping my 6-year-old boy with his homework, which involved his writing a mini book report — writing his name, the date, the title and author, and then drawing three pictures from the book. I got him through the writing part, despite his howling protests that “You’re killing me!” and “You’re giving me a heart attack!” and two attempts to choke himself with his own hands because I insist on legible penmanship. (My grad students who complain about the notes I wrote on their papers would sympathize.) With regard to the drawing part, I would say that next time he’d rather have his legs sawn off than have to draw. When we were done, he packed up his homework and then recycled some old graded papers he didn’t need any more. When I saw the title of a multi-page stapled project he’d worked on, I fished it out of the trash to read.

It’s entitled: “What Do You Know About Corn?”

I don’t know its origins, although it was handed out by his teacher (who, after all, is teaching a sanctioned curriculum) and has the look of one of those endlessly xeroxed elementary school handouts. So I’m wondering if it wasn’t authored directly by Earl Butz himself, and passed down ever since. It is an encomium to corn.

After three one-page sentences that lay out the fundamentals of the story of corn — when it’s planted, how quickly it grows!, and when it’s harvested — the message politics kick in.

Page 4: “Corn is in catsup, chewing gum, ice cream, candy, and pudding.” Yes — and that is precisely the problem. Because it belongs in none of those things.

Page 5: “Corn is used to feed cattle and people.” Yes — to the distress of both. Cattle get suppurating ulcers from being force-fed corn.

Page 6 (the dramatic conclusion): “Corn is the most valuable crop grown in the United States.”

It’s hard to argue with any of the statements in this little booklet. But if we take any lessons from the 20th century’s geniuses of propaganda — y’know, the folks who brought you all those genocides and wars — it’s that in addition to spreading outright lies, it’s valuable to present facts that build your cause, whether or not these facts are good things. It’s akin to what Stephen Colbert calls “truthiness.” There’s factiness in my kid’s corn booklet from school, but it’s not goodliness.

Am I against corn? No. I grew up eating it — on the cob, where it belongs. It’s when it pops up in candy and pudding and Mountain Dew and coffee creamer — all places it doesn’t belong — and my kid gets take-home propaganda about it that I get pissed.

Tonight while driving to the reading of a friend’s new play at Moving Arts, it struck me that two weeks ago was our theatre’s 16th anniversary. Sixteen years! It seemed astonishing: both that we had reached that milestone, and that no one had noticed. It simultaneously filled with a little awe and a little sadness.

Then I parked my car across the street from the theatre and got out and walked past the art gallery that opened there two years ago — except now it wasn’t an art gallery any more. It was a hair salon. When had this happened? At first I couldn’t believe it, and stood there looking in from the sidewalk at people getting their hair washed and cut until those people grew uncomfortable at me watching them in a place where just a couple of months ago there had been people looking at art. The gallery lasted two years. Somehow, we’ve made it to 16.

Some of us at Moving Arts have been so focused on what we don’t have — a larger theatre, a bigger bank account, much more of I don’t know what — that we’ve overlooked the simple accomplishment of staying alive and sticking to our mission of producing new plays. That has been difficult, and I don’t see it becoming easier any time in the future, but we’ve been doing it for 16 years now. Somehow. Seemingly impossibly.

I went inside and there it all was: the tiny stage, the creaking seats circa 1916 from a former silent movie house in San Francisco, the duvatyne drape that ripped when I moved it aside, and more. But I saw good playwright friends Dorinne and Ellen, and actor/director friends Darrell and Mark were in the reading, and so was Chuck, whom I hadn’t seen in several years, and four actors who were new to me and whose work was exciting, and then there was all the promise of this very good, very well-written, highly entertaining and provocative new play, and once again I lost sight of what we didn’t have. Because actually, we have a lot. And we’ve had a lot for 16 years. And maybe, if we’re lucky, we can keep having that for a while longer, and whether or not we do, we’ll always have the hundreds (thousands?) of actors and directors we’ve touched and worked with, and the hundreds of plays we helped shepherd into the universe. So for all we don’t have, we’re rich.

Happy Belated Birthday to us.

This just made me laugh.

Holy cow. Has it really been five days since I posted here? The reason is the usual one:  I was out of town again, and inevitably that means getting ahead on any number of projects and responsibilities so that I can be reasonably undisturbed while away, and then catching up when I return. But I didn’t realize it had been five days.

Where was I? Facilitating a retreat at a very nice resort just outside Palm Springs. There were about 30 attendees, and to a person they are good people who are actively engaged in their communities. And, so far as I can tell, they are all Republicans. (With the exception of one guy.) Here are the issues I heard about over dinner and discussions:  low taxes, a strong economy, a strong military, a smaller government, and personal freedom. My two thoughts about this:  1. Hey — those are my issues! (Along with some others.) 2. Then why remain a Republican? Because as far as I can see, the last eight years have equaled:  low taxes (okay, you got that one), a recklessly managed and now dangerously careening economy, a military stretched perilously thin with no strategy for success, a fantastically bloated federal government, and a federal government that demands to know everything about you in the name of security. If these are the things you oppose, why keep supporting the people responsible for it?

I’m speaking mostly with regard to the federal government. Here in California, the ingredients are different:  a Legislature that historically overspends, a 30-year-old proposition that drastically limits property taxes, a 2/3 requirement to raise taxes, term limits that ensure that experienced elected officials are forced to move on, an intransigent minority party, and a weak governor with no power over anyone (especially what is nominally his own party). Mix it all together and you get an $11 billion deficit, and a request from that governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, to the federal government to please bail us out. And… why not? What’s another $11 billion among friends? Heck, AIG will need another $11 billion just to pay for lunch tomorrow, and GM needs $50 billion just to fill up at the pump.

Tonight my family and I went out to dinner with my brother and sister-in-law, who are visiting from New Jersey. We compared notes about how the economy is doing in our circles, and frankly none of us seems to know. The stories vary so widely that they seem like anecdotal dispatches from a postapocalyptic land. Business seems good over here, bad over there, and uncertain all across the board. I said, “Nobody knows, and nobody knows what to do. When you look at the actions the government is taking every day, you have to conclude that they’re just guessing. They don’t really know what to do.”

So here’s the one thing we can count on:  First it will get better (or worse). Then it will get worse (or better). Then the cycle will repeat. It’s just a question of which will come first, better or worse, and how quickly these things will happen.

In the meantime, I’m allowing myself to be irrationally exuberant about at least one thing:  evidently, one of President-elect Obama’s  priorities is to close Guantanamo Bay. The economy is important. So is the character of the nation.

I’m still wondering how the Republicans are going to steal it. Thoughts?