It’s been a pretty cool year. I’ve learned a lot of things, changed a few things I’m doing, laughed a lot.
May 2013 be as fabulous as 2012 has been!
Mike Daisey and why theater is important
I watched the unfolding of the Mike Daisey story yesterday with some amusement and some shaking of my head and some outright complete bemusement.
In case you don’t know what happened with Mike Daisey, you can read the story here (or here, or here, or…). Basically, it comes down to this: Mike Daisey has a show he calls The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, in which he gives a monologue about how he went to China and discovering the conditions in which Chinese factory workers operate under subhuman conditions and never use the products they make.
You can read the monologue here. The popularity of his monologue was one of the factors in increasing questions about and investigations into how Chinese factories make electronic devices. And he was interviewed for a number of pieces on the subject — by the New York Times, and by This American Life on PRI. It turned out that Daisey had not interviewed the workers he said he did, he hadn’t experienced the things he said he had, and sometimes he relied on other journalists’ work and sometimes he just made shit up.
Given how many times I’ve seen people quote things Daisey said as gospel truth, this is somewhat problematic.
As Theater
Fuck you, naysayers. You can do anything in theater. Rock on with your monologue, Mike Daisey.
You want to present a theater piece saying the Trilateral Commission is behind everything that happens on the planet? Awesome. Make it thrilling and entertaining and I am there. Want to present a dramatic recreation of how George W. Bush instigated the Iraq War in order to steal the budget surplus and hand out billions to his supporters? Do it do it do it. An eighteen-hour multi-play cycle depicting what life is going to be like after we run out of oil? If you keep down the costs of stage effects and keep speaking roles to a minimum, some theater somewhere will stage that puppy.
If audience members turn out to be getting all of their facts about the world at large from the theater, that’s not the theater’s problem. That’s your problem, for being an ill-informed moron.
As News
Unfortunately, because Daisey presented his monologue as his real-life experiences and he never hedged on that line — he told everyone, “This is what I did” — he set himself up as an authority. And when it turned out that he lied, his reputation — as a truth teller, where it should have, and as a theatrical monologuist, where it should not have — became the story. When in fact the story is our journalists suck.
The biggest problem here is how many reputed journalists took Daisey’s stories at face value without apparently doing their own legwork. Reporters said, “Hey, I’ve stood outside of Foxconn and never run into workers saying crap like this…oh well, guess I just talked to the wrong workers. He must be right!”
According to Bloomberg, the reporter for Marketplace, Rob Schmitz, who discovered that yeah, Daisey overstepped (or outright lied) on a number of issues found the translator Daisey worked with by typing “Cathy translator Shenzhen” into Google. Which no one else had done. There’s some real investigative journalism right there, people.
I could go off on a rant about this whole topic (Quick! Name all the electronics manufacturers who have revealed not only their supply chain but specifically what they’re doing to improve conditions! Okay, I’ll make it easier! You only have to name more than one!) but I won’t. I’ve enjoyed making fun of Daisey over the past day only because he got so much attention for being an authority on a subject he wasn’t.
But his theatrical monologue? He isn’t the evening news, people. We don’t want to hear endless stories of “Well, I heard…” or “I read in a paper…” or “You know what it might be?” No, we want to hear what people have done. And that is how Daisey presented it.
Jason Grote, a playwright whose work I’ve never seen but whose Twitter feed I enjoy (and whose blog I enjoyed, before he discontinued it), had four really cogent tweets on the subject yesterday:
There are different levels to truth crimes:
And most especially, let’s keep a little perspective:
In case you don’t know who Trayvon Martin is, you can read about his death (and the racism that clearly caused it and lets his murderer go free) here.
I’m still of two minds. Anything that gets people thinking and connects with them emotionally (as Daisey clearly did, and as 97% of our entertainment so clearly doesn’t) is awesome. People clearly want what he said to be the gospel truth.
A good question is: WHY?
Vanity Fair done me in
I’ve subscribed to Vanity Fair for years. Years. Maybe twenty years. I had a roommate in college who subbed to it, and she described to me its wonderfulness, with pictorial spreads of Giorgio Armani clothing (I had to say, “Who’s that?” because I was so out of it) and gushing suck-up articles on celebrities, balanced with really wonderful and intelligent in-depth political and global work that was clearly being paid for by the pictorial spreads and gushing suck-ups. So be it.
During the oh-so-crucial shopping season of September through December, during which glossy magazines swell like so many Octomoms with their endless advertisements, Vanity Fair led me to invent a new verb, “to vanityfair,” which means, “to rip out the gigantic quantity of ads from the magazines, sometimes reducing its thickness by over a third.”
Every so often I’d say, “God, this magazine sucks, I have to stop getting it,” but then they’d have another article that was totally wonderful and unexpected and I’d start liking it again.
But they’ve done it. They’ve finally managed to get me off my ass and cancel my subscription.
Last month, they had Jessica Simpson on the cover. Why? I don’t know. The story was all about how she’s not fat, she’s gorgeous. I don’t know that much about her, and I knew when I first heard the “Jessica Simpson is fat” stories that they were all an attempt to get some attention and sympathy. To have Vanity Fair waste my time with that story made me go, “Oh, please, do we really not have any celebrities any more?”
(In fact, we don’t, not really. The reason we have Brad and Angelina on the checkout stand every week—well, maybe you do; thankfully, my supermarket does not have checkout tabloids, yay Lunardi’s—is that they are recognizable to a vast audience and have great crossover appeal. The great expansion of the entertainment infosphere through hundreds of channels and the internet and iPods and such has led to inevitable schisms of domain—now there are tons and tons of celebrities, all of whom are known to a smaller and smaller audience. Movies are targeted to extremely narrow audiences: the likelihood that anyone over the age of 35 knows the name Shia LaBeouf, let alone what he looks like or how to spell his name, is pretty damn low, which is why he was in that stupid Indiana Jones movie last summer.)
But no, it wasn’t even Jessica Simpson that did me in. It was their 87 millionth article in a row on the great travails caused by Bernie Madoff.
They could not say any louder that they are New York-centric; they couldn’t be any clearer that the magazine is designed to be read by people that range from the Upper West Side to the Long Island Expressway. They have lots of New York things and nothing else. It’s tiresome and incestuous, it really is.
I know Bernie Madoff did a very bad thing. But it’s really not Topic #1 everywhere in the country. It’s really not the most interesting thing to happen ever, you know?
No, apparently Vanity Fair doesn’t know, because in this month’s issue (possibly my last), there’s another goddamn Bernie Madoff article.
The obvious criticism, of course, is that Bernie Madoff is exactly the kind of uber-successful, high-flying financier that Vanity Fair has extolled and sucked up to for years. Their endless investigations of the criminality of the Bush years does not make up for their continual praise of the Bush gang while things were good. (Really bugged me at the time too.)
Anyhow, in case VF is wondering why they lost another subscriber, that’s why!
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