I dropped in on Wonder Con yesterday in Anaheim, and “dropping in” reminded me that, once upon a time, one could also “drop in” on its very big brother, the San Diego Comic-Con International. Whereas Comic Con is now a sold-out extravaganza featuring 150,000 people sluiced into one space and requiring military-style strategic planning to attend, when I first attended it in 1988 I believe there were 20,000 attendees and I was able to drive down on a lark, buy a ticket, and walk in. In other words:  pretty much the way one can still do with Wonder Con. While at Wonder Con yesterday, I was able to do something else almost impossible now at Comic-Con:  walk the entire exhibitors’ hall. At Comic-Con, that requires several days, good rations, and a sturdy camel. Wonder Con also had the added benefit of being staged in the same complex as a high school girls’ volleyball competition, but my friends and I pledge that we didn’t stop and watch any of that, because it was of zero interest to us. Zero.

My friend Larry Nemecek was once again hosting his show “Star Trek: Between the Cracks.” Three of his friends have pledged to gently help him find a better name for it. One name might be: “Everything you (n)ever wanted to know about ‘Star Trek.’ ” I realize that pronouncing that “(n)” is tricky, but it can be accomplished. Larry is impressively knowledgeable about Star Trek; I’m sure he knows Gene Roddenberry’s shoe size, and the whereabouts of Mr. Data’s missing car keys. In his show, Larry shares a lot of behind-the-scenes shots and a lot of trivia. As I can attest, having seen the response last year at Comic Con by my college kid’s friend, some people do want to see the inside of Rick Berman’s production trailer, circa 1987. (And I can understand that. I’m up for a discussion of all the costume and identity variations of Hank Pym, aka Ant-Man/Giant Man/Goliath/Yellowjacket/the Wasp.) So here’s the good thing:  If you didn’t make it to his panel yesterday, or catch him at some other convention appearance, you can visit his website where you can learn all sorts of Star Trek stuff every day, and sign up for his newsletter to find out even more. Here’s the link.

The only other thing I did at Wonder Con was, well, sleep. I arrived early at room 210-B, where Larry’s panel was, and sneaked off to a secluded little corner of the completely 210-A (no chairs, no tables, no people) and fell asleep on the nicely carpeted floor. This too was something that was once possible at Comic-Con — as it was at all the cons I attended in the 1970s. It felt like returning home.

Here’s a link to the “Retraction” podcast of This American Life.

It’s painful to listen to all around.

The podcast includes two interviews with Mike Daisey, and in one his facts are taken apart stitch by stitch by a reporter from public radio’s Marketplace show, a reporter who lives and works in China and who has toured the very factory Mike Daisey talked about, and who knows that the facts shared are not true. Yes, Mike Daisey lied about what he found. Evidently, he did not find children making Apple products. He did not interview as many people, or tour as many factories as he said. He wholecloth appropriated the story of a factory accident that happened 1000 miles away. He said that the factory had guards with guns, which it didn’t. He did not interview a man whose hand had been turned into “a claw” who had never before seen an iPad, even though he’d made his living assembling them. All these things, plus more, are fabrications, and Daisey cops to it. I don’t like what Mike Daisey did here, and I share Ira Glass’s outrage and barely sheathed anger at being lied to.

It’s also painful to listen to the last segment of the show — in which an actual reporter is interviewed by Ira Glass about the actual working conditions of the factories in China where Apple products are manufactured. Many of the sort of abuses that Mike Daisey made up exist in actuality. According to this report, Apple has made some course corrections — in eliminating child workers, for one — but there’s still work to be done, and I hope they mandate it quickly. They need to establish stricter standards and insist upon them.

I hope that two things come out of this sad story. One is that, ultimately, factory workers in China and elsewhere get better working conditions. The second is that we all take this as yet another reminder that lying — whether you’re Mike Daisey, or James Frey, or Richard Nixon, or Bill Clinton, or Jayson Blair, or Janet Cooke — is wrong.

Over on The Daily Beast, Jacob Bernstein quotes an associate of Mike Daisey about where the playwright-performer went wrong:

“One of his weaknesses is his sanctimoniousness,” says this person, who wished to remain anonymous. “That’s true with most artists. Most playwrights don’t like to see other people’s plays, most writers are not kind of about other people’s writing. Mike has made himself an easy target because he can’t keep his mouth shut. He got really excited about the press.”

While I’m not prepared to issue a blanket indictment of “most artists” as being sanctimonious, I’ve caught myself at it in the past, and I’ve seen it in plenty of other artists and non-profit arts organizations. We do like to think we’re changing the world for the better. So perhaps Mike Daisey’s story is not one of perfidious self-service (I hope not); perhaps it’s one of hubris, of honest error, and of getting caught up in his own press. I just wish he’d clarified the lines between fact and fiction.

I think we should also mention that it’s not just artists who try to change the world. Business does that too. I remember the argument by the Clinton administration during the NAFTA debates that the best way to improve the lives of people in other countries was to welcome them into the big economy. In spirit, I agree with that, and that is the argument underlying many of the pro-Apple comments found on various sites covering this story (including the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and the Wall Street Journal):  that conditions in Chinese factories will improve precisely because Apple is there, subcontracting these people. The argument is also occasionally expanded to claim that doing work on Apple products is already better than the alternative. As the front page of today’s Wall Street Journal Business & Finance section reports:

The company [Apple] also went on a media offensive of its own, inviting ABC News into a Foxconn factory. An ABC reporter found evidence of teenagers doing work of “soul-crushing boredom” that was better than the conditions where they were from in the countryside.

Why is Apple making these products in China in the first place? According to Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs, it’s because Chinese factories were able to implement changes almost overnight — in keeping with Mr. Jobs’ mercurial personality. When Jobs decided he didn’t want plastic for the first iPhone screen, Tim Cook, now the CEO of Apple, realized that U.S. factories couldn’t shift to manufacturing the necessary specialized glass screens in time to make their proposed launch date, and he moved the company to manufacturing in China, where employees could be made to live on-site, and be awakened at any moment to be put back to work.

Why are factories able to enforce such work conditions in China? Because of government complicity and the lack of labor unions. And what led to the creation of government oversight and labor unions in the U.S.? Grueling work conditions and workplace calamities such as the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. Those 146 garment workers who died in that fire in 1911, most of them young immigrant women, were the Chinese factory workers of their day. As China (and India) spring into modern industrialism, they will find that brutal government repression is required to keep their work standards low. That, and the sort of cold heartlessness almost all people everywhere thankfully lack.

 One story I’ve been following all day is this one: that public radio’s “This American Life” has “retracted” the episode they ran several weeks ago culled from Mike Daisey’s monologue show “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs” because it contains fabrications. Here’s This American Life executive producer Ira Glass’s statement on their blog. Here are some excerpts from that statement:

We’ve learned that Mike Daisey’s story about Apple in China – which we broadcast in January – contained significant fabrications. We’re retracting the story because we can’t vouch for its truth. This is not a story we commissioned. It was an excerpt of Mike Daisey’s acclaimed one-man show “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs,” in which he talks about visiting a factory in China that makes iPhones and other Apple products. …

Daisey lied to me and to This American Life producer Brian Reed during the fact checking we did on the story, before it was broadcast. That doesn’t excuse the fact that we never should’ve put this on the air. In the end, this was our mistake….

During fact checking before the broadcast of Daisey’s story, This American Life staffers asked Daisey for this interpreter’s contact information. Daisey told them her real name was Anna, not Cathy as he says in his monologue, and he said that the cell phone number he had for her didn’t work any more. He said he had no way to reach her.

“At that point, we should’ve killed the story,” says Ira Glass, Executive Producer and Host of This American Life. “But other things Daisey told us about Apple’s operations in China checked out, and we saw no reason to doubt him. We didn’t think that he was lying to us and to audiences about the details of his story. That was a mistake.”….

Mike Daisey’s response, essentially, has been that his show is theatre, not journalism. That response hasn’t satisfied BusinessWeek, among others. I have playwright friends who’ve been emailing me with pretty much the same rationale. Here’s a response (edited together from several emails) from a very talented, literate, thoughtful playwright friend:

 But isn’t Mike Daisey giving a fictional portrayal of real events?  He is a character in his own play. Even if he had never been to China, he’s not making up what goes on over there. He’s just telling it effectively (in my view).

I guess this incident makes me feel particularly vulnerable, because I feel like I would have done the same thing – I would have crafted a compelling story from the facts I was exposed to, so that I could best get my message across. I don’t consider it lying, I consider it good storytelling.

I agree that branding Daisey a liar gives Apple cover to hide behind. But they already claimed to be changing their practices, rather than proclaiming their innocence, so I hope this comes too late for that.

But here’s the interesting question to me – because I agree with you, misrepresenting facts or disregarding them is detrimental to whatever cause you are trying to advance – but if you are just doing what I do as a playwright, which is taking something that I know is true and structuring it and manipulating it so that it has the highest impact, in order to get the result I want, and that makes a big corporation like Apple change, then why is that bad? How does that make Daisey’s emotional manipulation of his audience worse than James Cameron’s or Arthur Miller’s? I guess it gets to the question of, what is truth, really? Isn’t it more than a series of facts?

I would argue that his show is entirely true. It may not be factual, but it’s true.

In Titanic, James Cameron is giving a fictional portrayal of real events.

In The Crucible, Arthur Miller is doing the same.

I once wrote a play about Hieronymus Bosch. Given the dialogue alone, I think it’s clear that I just made it up, and even if it isn’t clear, I didn’t pass it off as being “true” or built upon the facts of my recent trip to 15th century Brabant.

But Mike Daisey’s show has Mike Daisey saying, I went to China and here’s what I saw.

And it isn’t true.

Mike Daisey didn’t say he was giving a fictional portrayal. He said, essentially, that his first-person show was a show about the facts of his trip to China.

And that’s where all the problems come from.

Moreover, as Max Fisher writes on The Atlantic’s website, the problem with this story is now that the story is “Mike Daisey’s lies,” when the story should be — and had been — inhuman work conditions in China. Now the story is directed in the wrong direction, and now all the facts of what all of us had taken as an expose, have been challenged.  Which gives cover to Apple.

I’m glad Mike Daisey took on this issue and spread it. I wish he had stuck to the facts of his encounters.

In which Christopher Walken reads — and interprets! — “Where the Wild Things Are” for us. Just another wonderful thing found on the Internet that completely validates the existence of humankind.

I just read the “medicine guide” that came with my new (short-term) prescription. Quoting from the “guide:”

“What are the possible side effects of xxx?”

“Serious side effects include:

• heart attack
• stroke
• high blood pressure
• heart failure from body swelling (fluid retention)
• kidney problems including kidney failure
• bleeding and ulcers in the stomach and intestine
• low red blood cells (anemia)
• life-threatening skin reactions
• life-threatening allergic reactions
• liver problems including liver failure
• asthma attacks in people who have asthma

“Other side effects include:

• stomach pain
• constipation
• diarrhea
• gas
• heartburn
• nausea
• vomiting
• dizziness

“Get emergency help right away if you have any of the following symptoms:

• shortness of breath or trouble breathing
• chest pain
• weakness in one part or side of your body
• slurred speech
• swelling of the face or throat

“Stop your medicine and call your healthcare provider right away if you have any of the following symptoms:

• nausea
• more tired or weaker than usual
• itching
• your skin or eyes look yellow
• stomach pains
• flu-like symptoms
• vomit blood
• there is blood in your bowel movement or it is black and sticky like tar
• unusual weight gain
• skin rash or blisters with fever
• swelling of the arms and legs, hands and feet

When I went to see my doctor this morning, she asked why I wasn’t already taking something.

I’m thinking she hasn’t read this.

I’m considering going back to my mother’s treatment for everything:  a shot of whiskey before bed. It’s served her well for 87 years.

Admittedly, navigating Silver Lake can be tricky, partly because the “lake” (actually, a large man-made reservoir that I ran around as part of my marathon training three-and-a-half years ago when I was, oh, ten pounds healthier) fills the district much as an olive pit always seems to come between you and the edible part and with similar unhappy results, and partly because the district traverses a mountain or two at odd angles and extreme inclinations, resulting in twisting narrow switchback streets interrupted with no warning by unexpected stop signs or the onward rush of crossing cars at right angles.

So we should be all the more grateful that McSweeney’s has provided these helpful instructions for attaining Andrew Nicholls’ house.

“The Car Plays” closed yesterday at La Jolla Playhouse in San Diego, and with it my play Dead Battery. This was my first production in San Diego and, it occurred to me just now, this was the greatest number of performances of any of my plays. Oh, sure, I’ve had plays run for months, and this one ran only three weekends — but this play was performed 15 times a night, for a total of 180 performances. After that many performances, 15 a night for three weeks, and given the subject matter — a distraught woman cleaning out the car of her dead son — and the intensity of her performance, complete with crying and shaking and raging with anger, I can only assume that my actress is now checked into the Betty Ford Center.

Today a writer friend and I went out to lunch at The Daily Grill in Burbank. The waitress was friendly and attentive, but as my pal and I made our way through lunch, she became overly solicitous, popping by seemingly every minute to see if we “needed” anything else. How was the water? Could she get anything else? Was everything tasting okay? Did we leave room for dessert? No, the restaurant wasn’t stacked up — we weren’t hogging the table, in other words — but every time I was pulling a fork to my mouth or trying to say something, there she was with yet another interruption. The capper came when she presented us with the bill, my friend and I agreed to split it, he set his credit card atop it while I was still fishing for my wallet, and she instantly reappeared to say, “Can I take that for you?” To which I replied:

“Can you give us a minute????”

She pulled a face, tried to make a joke of it (“No, no I can’t,” which led me to think that now she understood her error), and left.

And then, of course, in proving again the Chinese proverb to be careful what you wish for, we couldn’t get her back to the table to take the card. We looked up and down, asked a busboy about her whereabouts, called for her, and were about to get the manager, when finally she returned. She asked flatly if we were now ready (which left me thinking that no, she had not understood her error), we assured her that yes we were now ready, and she left with the card and with the cash I had put in with it. Two minutes later she was back, triumphant, card and pleatherette check bill presenter in her hand, thrusting it at me because the card wouldn’t go through.

“It’s not my card,” I said, “it’s his.”

The waitress put the bill and the bad credit card back onto the table and walked away, even though my friend was ready instantly with another credit card. Again, we looked around and waited and I was getting ready for the manager, but I figured I’d take the opportunity to use the restroom. When I came back — she still hadn’t taken it. Eventually she came and took it, and this time his card went through (my cash was always good), and eventually we got out of there.

If someone could train her to even out her lags after I snapped at her, with her constant interruptions earlier on, her timing would be perfect.

I learned today via a message on Facebook that an old friend of mine, someone I was once very close to and spent a lot of time with, is now, at age 47, a crack addict. I was horrified. Am horrified. I haven’t seen this person in 24 years, but have thought of him often — and now I’m going to think of this often. As you can imagine, all the ramifications of addiction have played out across his relationships, and now no one knows where he is. All day, I debated whether or not I was going to post this here, but my astonishment seems to demand it. I’ve known all sorts of people with all sorts of problems, and an inordinate number of suicides (both successful and attempted), but at the moment, this one seems most horrible. Should I add what a waste this is, of someone I was very fond of, someone very very talented?