MeyerBros

“The more people you reach the more likely it is that you’re reaching the wrong people.” –Seth Goudin

Ursula K. LeGuin has a fantastic article in this month’s Harpers, called “Staying Awake: Notes on the Alleged Decline of Reading.” The premise is this: reading was never popular in the first place. The decline is in books as exponentially profitable big business. The crossover is easy to see in other artistic mediums.

Books no longer have a monopoly on pop entertainment. Literature as an art, on the part of both authors and readers, was never popular to begin with, and isn’t going anywhere. Some people like writing or reading as art and others don’t. But publishers who rely on the next big hit are finding that the next big hit may be in a different medium.

That is from the artist’s perspective: we’ve always been a minority, even when our medium was being used as the pop medium. But there’s a business/technology side to it as well, that companies may have to pick up on. The advent of the internet is the advent of the long tail: Why make everyone buy the same product, when you can easily sell each person the product they want? Suddenly the long tail of small sales become a threat to business built around pop hits.

Theatre was once the pop medium, to the point of riots between fans of rival actors. The fact that pop media has found a new venue doesn’t mean theatre is dead. Taking the focus off big hits might even make room for more new theatre to happen. Can the long tail make a comeback once the hit-makers are gone? I think it’s something to hope for.

Art isn’t dying - the middleman is dying. And it’s about time. Just ask Radiohead and Wilco.

2 out of 5 stars
someone airbrushed my fugard

I have to admit - I saw it coming when I saw the airbrushed cover art. And I was right. Within the first five minutes this movie had deviated so far from the book (and the book’s intention) that there was no way back. The complexity of Athol Fugard’s characters is reduced to simplistic stereotyping and meaningless redemption. Fugard’s story is gritty and complex, where this movie has an air-brushed and pristine gilding with nothing underneath. The movie changes everything from Tsotsi’s past (where the political context of apartheid is removed and replaced by a drunk father), to the present story (where a complex story of personal growth is replaced by a crime thriller), and even his implied future (where an honest story of redemption is replaced by, well, fluff). There is no way to call this the same story. Please read the book (and the rest of Athol Fugard’s work) before you watch this movie.

oooo… I was with you right until that last bit.

(Sidenote: I was going to post this as a comment on Eric’s post, but then it got long and I decided to make it my own post. A review of his post, if you will.)

Some great questions, points, musings… But the “edification of the artists involved” part I question. At the New York Times, there is an ombudsman (yes, he’s a man), and he is the person who speaks for the readers (ie, the audience) - not for the paper. Speaking for the paper (ie, the artists) would be the editors in their editorials (like the Artistic Directors in our letters and director’s notes to audience). So the way I understand it, an ombuds for a theatre would be someone on staff who would express views of the audience (”the people”), not views of the artists.
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the SSDC and the DGA are entangled in an all out (sometimes legal) battle over copyright issues. everyone, surprisingly, wants to be paid for the work that they do.

i’ve been reading the latest issue of The Dramatist, a magazine that i recieve as a member of the DGA. i love this magazine as much as i hate it. every issue is thrilling, inspiring, angering, pathetic, self-centered, energizing, smug and insulur. what more could you ask for in a publication. i am reminded with every issue that New York is the only important place in the world (with the occasional minor exception of Chicago), playwrights are the only important people in the theatre, and nearly everyone is out to get me. i can also read back-to-back articles by Marsha Norman and Richard Nelson, the former listing her simplistic rules of playwrighting (which she teaches at Juilliard) and the latter arguing that such rules are the bane of playwrighting (which he teaches at Yale). neither one, you will notice, is too far from the center of the universe, which is Broadway. and neither one dares question the centrality of playwriting in that universe. this is, after all, “The Journal of The Dramatists Guid of America, Inc.” the issue concludes with a playwright’s legal battle against a former director in copyright issues. i disagree with both sides of that one article. that’s a lot to disagree with, but as a young anabaptist radical i consider myself up for that sort of third-way challenge.
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