Mike Daisey’s on-stage investigation of Apple and its impact on the world, which closes today at Berkeley Rep, continues to make waves in the tech sphere, as this piece in today’s New York Times shows. I didn’t get to see it while it was running in the Bay Area — as ideal a home for it, I think, as Hamlet found his uncle’s court to be when he wanted to see his little play staged — but I suspect I will in some place, at some time: It now moves on to Woolly Mammoth in Washington, DC, and then Seattle Rep.
While I’m somewhat on the subject, I should note that I’m writing this from a MacBook Pro while snowbound in the mountains above Banning, California. I have a wifi signal — although it’s iffy — but my AT&T iPhone can’t connect to the cellular network. One of the regulars here asked a highly placed AT&T executive about getting cellphone coverage up here. His response, I was told: “Get Verizon.”
And it’s asking, “Who moved my cheese?” This first “cyborg” is operated by a mouse brain — actually, a number of mouse brains stitched together. I love technology — and I’m surprised to find that this little video saddens and frightens me.
I couldn’t help thinking about the mouse’s “soul” — which I find I do believe in, as we understand it, and which is housed (or manifested) by the brain, at least while it’s “here.” (Clearly, I need to do some further thinking about this. Because I haven’t yet squared the functions of the brain with the location of “the soul,” against my other belief: in an afterlife.) In any event, watching the “cyborg” scurry about, I had the same response I’m sure everyone will: That it looked like a mouse trying to find its way out. Which made me think that that is a sad, lonely, and tortuous experience for the mouse. I say this also realizing that I’m personifying a thing that I’m not sure is “alive,” and that I’m also not sure how to define “life.” This, against the context of an often human-seeming robot beating two “Jeopardy” champs handily last week. We’re all going to have more and more of our assertions challenged by Artificial Intelligence and artificial/organic symbiosis.
Thoughts about that?
It’s not the response I would have expected from myself.
I’m sharing this interactive scale of the universe tool to help people get a better sense of perspective. It is indeed eye-opening, although it has one flaw, a bad one: I’m not drawn large enough. I hope they can fix that.
I just came across this new video about Moving Arts, the theatre company I co-founded in 1992. You know you’ve built something successful when now you find out by accident about marketing initiatives like this, when you’re even name-checked in the video, and you had no idea about it previously. (In other words: They don’t need me any more. Sniff sniff.)
By the way, I saw the one-act festival mentioned herein last week and there’s some terrific work in it. I’m sure that at some point I’ll be stealing that set-design concept, which ingenuously unifies the five plays. Here’s where to get tickets.
We’re less than two weeks out from The One-Day New Play Playwriting Workshop I’m running with Trey Nichols. Click here for more info. To answer some anticipated questions: no, you don’t have to already be a playwright to enroll; yes, actors do well with this; and no, we don’t give feedback in this style:
This weekend I was supposed to take my wife and two kids to a mountaintop family resort in Banning, CA for RV camping, fishing, barbecuing, hiking, and playing in the snow — man-made snow that they were having trucked in. But my wife broke her toe, so hiking was out; then they informed us that the fishing was off because they had to drain the lake to clear reeds; then we were informed that the man-made snow was canceled because rain looked likely; and just when my wife and I were trying to envision four days and three nights in an RV with squabbling siblings and no wifi, I was contacted by two board members of the resort and the executive director that maybe we shouldn’t come because it looked like there was going to be a massive snowfall — of snow generated the old-fashioned, natural way — and we would be either snowed in, or stuck on the mountain trying to get in. So instead we stayed home and watched “Fringe” and other things Friday night.
On Saturday, newly unscheduled, I decided to tackle some chores:
putting the year’s worth of unread “Hulk” and “Incredible Hulk” comics into chronological order so that I can read them later
taking all 20 of my unlaundered dress shirts to the dry cleaner’s
getting together all my tax records for my CPA; this took four hours
cleaning my email in-box down to 58 emails I need to respond to — that’s real progress
editing something I’m writing for publication
sending my revised bio to the nice people at the Great Plains Theatre Conference
buying beer and beef sticks
buying a form-molding pillow for my bed, and a form-molding bath pillow for the bath, because yes, my neck is still killing me off-and-on from the car accident four months ago
buying a soldering iron so that I could fix a shoe buckle and a belt buckle
coming home to do that soldering, abetted by my daughter who has learned in school to solder far better than I ever did
reading the new issue of New Avengers
taking a long jacuzzi bath, during which I tested out that new bath pillow and read most of that New Yorker story on Paul Haggis’ resignation from Scientology; I don’t have an opinion one way or the other about Scientology because I can’t quite figure out why it’s any of my business, or how it varies that widely from almost every other religion except that it’s new, but I do have the opinion that this story in no way merits all that space in the New Yorker
coming downstairs to drink one of those beers and work on my play, “I, Teratoma,” which is what I was doing just before…
A week and a half ago, I proposed that the Spider-Man musical might have been better if they’d had an actual Spider-Man writer involved. Sounds like the producers have now gotten one of those involved — and, importantly, it’s one who is also a playwright.
The unanswered question is: What could be changed in the script that could make the show better? In my experience, every production gets its own culture — its own informing ethos — that is distinct from what’s in the script; Apple and IBM may both make computers, but they do them rather differently, and what we see is a reflection not just of the different plans on paper, but of the different company cultures. A theatrical production is mounted by a production company, and that company culture is difficult to change. Once you get too far into the rehearsal process, it’s difficult to change directions, and “Spider-Man: Turn off the Dark” is a show that, more or less, for better or worse, seems to have opened, and long ago. (It has also been widely reviewed, and savagely panned.) Add to that that this is supposedly the most technically demanding show in Broadway history; what significant changes can be made when you’ve already got that much physical hardware in place? And finally: With a show that is already legendary for the injuries incurred in some very dangerous stunts, how much will producers want to risk in changing how the rigging and pyrotechnics and whatnot work in relation to the script?
It’s a lot to overcome. I hope they can work it out.
Many years ago, just out of high school on a camping outing with friends, I drank too much, acted up, ate a raw chicken, and passed out on the outside of the tent when I thought I was inside it. When I woke up, I was lying next to a pile of blood-red chicken bones and covered in dew. In other words, I was not strangely beautiful like these giant hi-res photos of bugs in the morning dew. But some people certainly wanted to squish me.
If you wondered what the meeting between Obama and tech CEOs Steve Jobs, Eric Schmidt, and Mark Zuckerberg is about, I think this will sum up much of it.
