Here’s one Congressman who doesn’t think he should get paid during a government shutdown, and what he’s doing about it.

I’ve been living in California for 25 years now. For many of those years, budgets were passed way past our constitutionally mandated drop-dead date for budget passage. So a few years ago, voters approved a measure that docks the pay of legislators until a budget is passed. Here’s what has happened every year since: we’ve had budgets passed, on time.

I have little doubt what would happen if we enacted that for Congress.

My company’s building is in a semi-industrial area and across a side street from a liquor store. There are obvious benefits to being next to a liquor store — access to liquor (and other comestibles), pretty much whenever we need it — and there is one pretty big minus: a veritable stream of litter that washes across our frontage with regularity. Every day that I’m in, I’m out there picking up brown paper bags, candy wrappers, cigarette butts, lottery tickets, empty sample-sized bottles of booze and everything else imaginable. There’s a trash can front and center in front of that liquor store, but people would just rather drop their trash while they walk away. The problem is further compounded by a Jack in the Box on the other side of the liquor store.

The other thing we get too frequently is auto accidents. There’s a major intersection by that Jack in the Box, and there’s that side street, and there’s a significant artery that splits in two just past us. Especially if you don’t know where you’re going, it can get complicated. We’ve been here two-and-a-half years and I think I’ve seen five accidents.

Today there was another one. It sounded a little different — certainly a car hitting something, but the impact sounded lighter, more plastic-like. I ran out to check and saw the remnants of a blue motorcycle splayed across that side street, its two riders sitting curbside, the driver holding his head while blood poured from his nose, and nearby the driver of the Jeep that had hit them. Somebody else at my company, plus a neighbor with another business, both called 911.

I went back inside and got a cold bottle of water for the motorcycle driver and gave it to him. He accepted it gratefully then asked if I had any paper towels. It was then that I saw the blood was gushing all over his hands and legs. I said sure and ran in and got him some paper towels and brought them out. I hung around to see if there was anything else I could do, but there didn’t seem to be anything, so when the ambulance and the police cars showed up I went back inside.

I’m here late tonight and there’s nothing left to eat in our refrigerator or freezer, and I don’t want to be here that late anyway, so I headed over to that liquor store to buy a beef stick and some Bugles. Just something to tide me over. I could see that everything from the accident had been cleaned up. The motorcycle pieces were gone, and the police had put sand over the areas where the motorcycle’s gas and oil had leaked into large pools. Yes, everything was cleaned up… except the bottle of water I’d given the driver. There it was, uncapped, half of it drunk, left right there with a bloody thumbprint on it, for me to clean up.

Many, many years ago, my friend Rich Roesberg told me that his job as the manager of a bookstore was to reorder and sell books — and to scrape the gum out of the carpet. I think of that every day.

Effective today, I’m no longer artistic director of Moving Arts, the theatre I founded in 1992. And it’s a good thing.

I love my theatre company, and all of our history, and I enjoyed being artistic director from 1992 to 2002, and then again for about the past five years. But here’s what I really want to do now with Moving Arts: be the best supporter of our new artistic director and our company as possible — and be a playwright. I loved running a theatre, but it’s time (again) for new people, and I have another company I’m leading right now (this one, with my business partner, which provides another place to work with smart, talented people every day).

Here’s the announcement re our new artistic director, Darin Anthony. We picked Darin over a surprising number of other well-qualified people who applied. We did that because in addition to being awfully talented, and smart, and dedicated to new-play development, he’s the right fit for us. As he said on Sunday night when he addressed the theatre company on the eve of the announcement, he didn’t just want to be an artistic director, he wanted to be artistic director of Moving Arts (and had been quietly campaigning for the post for two years). Moreover, he has an attractive
vision for where we can go.

This is an exciting moment, for Moving Arts and for me. I’m looking forward to lots of productions and workshops and readings and developmental labs of new plays, including, I hope, my own.

Nice to see that the problem with glorified news readers isn’t limited just to the U.S. Here’s a BBC anchor holding a ream of paper he had mistaken for an iPad. Yes, he made a mistake in grabbing the wrong thing — but what was the point of the iPad anyway, if it wasn’t necessary for this bit. The ream of paper seems to work equally well. The missing iPad, then, is revealed for what it was going to be all along: a prop that says “we’re au currant.”

Starbucks says guns are unwelcome.

People can still order a double shot, though.

Another shooting rampage today, this time in our nation’s Capitol. Ho hum. Oh well — guess there’s nothing to be done about any of this.

As for my Congressman, he’s providing “thoughts and prayers.” Because that has been working so well.

Renaissance man Steve Martin premieres the first hymn for atheists. It has none of the soaring beauty of “Amazing Grace,” but a lot more comedy.

Here’s Jonathan Franzen on what’s wrong with the modern world. You’ll have to read this twice, or, at least, I will have to (and intend to).

I’m wary of what a playwright friend calls “old poopism,” and Franzen, a novelist I admire tremendously, does come across here as an old poop. Whether or not we have the time to read impenetrable writers like Karl Kraus (of whom I’d never heard, even after reading I think five biographies of Franz Kafka), we have little or no access to his writing or his ideas. Or, at least, we never did — until the Internet, which is one of those pesky new-world developments Franzen seems to be deploring.

(Full disclosure: I make my living almost entirely via these newfangled things associated with the Internet. But whether or not that contributes to my bias, I’ve always been more interested in the future than the past.)

Culturally, here’s where I most often hear old poopism, and no, it isn’t with regard to technology. Most of the people I come across all over the country embrace technology; those who don’t, want to but don’t know how to. I have a friend who is 84 and exceedingly interesting (he went from the CIA into real estate, and then Democratic politics; there is some joke waiting to be made there); another friend and I were trying to teach him how to text when we were all out of town together, and then discovered his shortfall: an ancient cellphone with all the computing power of an Etch-a-Sketch that turned texting into a hard-fought endeavor. He hasn’t gotten a smartphone yet (Ken, are you listening?), but he’s a regular on Facebook and email. My mother, at age 88, wishes she could understand some of these things, because she sees the benefits — long-distance interaction with relatives that includes more than just a phone call. So, again, whether it’s with clients or friends or relatives or colleagues, I don’t see any resistance to technology.

No, it’s music where I see it.

If I hear one more person proclaim the musical superiority of the ’60s or ’70s, I’m going to throw up. Because never before in the history of humankind have we had so much access to so much music, a lot of it really really good.

I could point you to some current musical favorites — and, in fact, I will. TV on the Radio is a terrific rock n’ roll band, one that acknowledges the past of straight-ahead rock n’ roll while bringing into play harmonic inventiveness and studio wizardry and the sort of oddball sounds and buzzes that to my ear always lend an extra dimension. Danger Mouse, whether recording with Gnarls Barkley or Broken Bells or on any of his innumerable other projects, is perhaps the foremost production talent since Brian Eno. Like Eno, Danger Mouse brings a distinctive sound and a sharp intelligence to everything he touches; unlike Eno, he can also play guitar, and drums, and keyboard, and bass — as I witnessed when I saw Broken Bells in concert two years ago. Gnarls Barkley especially shows that he, partnered with Cee-lo Green, can effortlessly summon up the best of Motown and make it fresh and danceable. Finally, I’m smitten with Of Mountains and Men, a merry alt-folk group from Iceland. Their sound is cheery and pours out of the radio like a perfect poolside cocktail.

I could go on — I like AWOL Nation and Polica as well, to name just two more — but I take the time to make this point because I guarantee you most people you run into over 35 are expressing their belief that music was somehow “better” as recently as… their early 20s. And it wasn’t. It just had a different emotional impact for them because they were in their early 20s. It is that way with technology (see Franzen, above, who seems to be extolling the virtues of the 19th century equivalent of a German literary fanzine) and it is that way with politics, and it is that way with culture.

Here’s my feeling: The past is past, and it isn’t coming back. One thing we know for sure about the past is this: No one lives there any more. If you’d like to shape the future, in your daily life or in the world, it’s better to make a clear-eyed assessment of its potential rather than to knee-jerk reject it for a prior era you’re romanticizing.

Here’s a brief current events test you can take to see how much you know, compared against the rest of the population. To my own surprise, I scored 100%. (It was surprising because someone I know, who seems to read and know everything, somehow missed two of these. I think I did even better because I read business newspapers too.) Here you go.

Here’s what happens when you deny some people their Chicken McNuggets — at 6:30 a.m., when they aren’t ever available. What you get instead is a pretty big unhappy meal: 60 days in a Toledo jail (where they don’t serve Chicken McNuggets).