Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Okay, okay. Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in.

I was real tempted to spout off when the Feds indicted some Carpenters for embezzlement, bribery, wire fraud on the same day that Garth Drabinsky started his 7 years of research on a musical version of “The Big House.” It was certainly an karmic rich environment with Drabinsky’s attorney (or “mouthpiece” as Darth is learning) proposing that Drabinsky do community service by speaking to theatre students about “avoidance of unethical conduct” and the knuckleheaded President of the Carpenters turning himself in and testing positive for cocaine and marijuana. But thinking that I might not have anything positive to add to the conversation, I withheld comment.

But now some punk cheesehead from Racine, sitting at his computer alone in the dark in his underwear, is sending out anonymous emails about Union members not attending the Town Hall meeting about health care reform.

From the Huntington Post.

You socialist f---s have the nerve to say stop the violence at the town hall meetings when they weren't violent until you p---ies showed up because your n----- leader obama said to?????? When we have ours in Racine, Wi, I want you there. I want one of your little b----- to put his hands on this Marine. I want one of you to look or talk to me wrong. I'll be the last thing your ignorant faux body guards will remember for a very long time. You can f---ing guarantee that.

Yo, yo, Joe Cheesehead, over here, listen up. I fully realize that as a member of organized labor and a union member, I belong to one of the most despised minorities in the United States today. In fact I take a bit of pride in that. It’s an outlaw thing. And I understand that you, Joe The Dumber, are not really arguing for the retention of corporate profits in place of healthcare, in some form, for all. It’s that whole supremacist thing, us vs. them that you want to keep. That little high your brain produces when the hate juices are flowing. But you are allowing yourself to be played by the racist fear mongers that seem to have dominated the body politic since Joe McCarthy’s red baiting and Nixon’s “Southern Strategy.” The same billionaires that are shipping the industrial base of America to cheap labor markets are using your rage to promote their money driven control over every aspect of your life. Wake up. You don’t like the way things are and you’re afraid to change. Not a pleasant place to be. And so you rage.

You do have a right, guaranteed the Constitution, to have freedom of speech. So do I. However your right to swing your fist stops at the end of my nose. So lets stop the threats, the name-calling and the pitting of Americans against Americans. Don’t hang on to your hate but don’t lose your rage. Direct it against the people who are really ruining America.

It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Does anyone else see a similarity between the uproar over Nancy Pelosi and scenery? Not to make light of the suffering these human beings were put through but it seems to me that blaming Nancy Pelosi for the torture scandal is like blaming the closing of a show on the scenery. Both were in the background, neither were strutting and fretting his hour upon the stage. She didn't write the play, cast it, light it, prop it or even elect to produce the turkey in the first place. And now the actors and producers are saying, “Nancy, why didn’t you tell us this one was a stinker? It’s your fault!”

And the Times dutifully reports about the latest fight backstage as if it was actually somehow consequential. “Minsky outraged he’s not being sued for a million.”

There’s the news and then there’s the facts. What a world.

Beware The People Weeping

For the first time in a number of years, May Day celebrations in Europe turned into riots. The loss of their standard of living, rising unemployment and lost benefits were the cause of the large May Day turnout. In the US, we, as workers, don't need to espouse any alternative types of economic systems because everything is just going just great. In fact, in the US we don't celebrate May Day anymore because in 1959, the day was rebranded Loyalty Day.

Anger and hunger have a way of making movements develop before there are press releases, before time can be reserved on the bird for stand-ups, before it can be packaged. Gil Scott Heron had some thoughts on this. As did John Steinbeck in the Grapes Of Wrath which is well worth a watch again.

I came across Herman Melville's "The Martyr", his elegy on Lincoln's death, and the last stanza gave me a shock.

The Martyr
Herman Melville
...............
There is sobbing of the strong,
And a pall upon the land;
But the People in their weeping
Bare the iron hand:
Beware the People weeping
When they bare an iron hand.

The truth can be a fearsome thing.

Mopping The Counting-up Room Floor

Bloomberg has an article that describes the latest feeding frenzy in the shark filled waters of Broadway. Seems that those folks who believe that the arts exist for the sole benefit of themselves, i.e. the Producers, lifted the curtain on a little drama being played out with the party of the second part, i.e. the Theatre Owners, the other folks who believe that the arts exist solely for themselves. The subject only seems to be "a comprehensive discussion on the economics of the producer- theater-owner" because-the wolf is at the door, the wolf is at the door!

Learning their lessons from the Bob ( Ain't Nobodies Bidness If I Do ) Sillerman school of theatre production, some of the Producers are contending that the reason audiences are staying away from yet another juke-box musical is because of additional fees charged by the house, like the fee for staying after the show and actually counting the receipts. “The landlords won’t ever admit they charge bogus fees,” said the producer of several major Broadway hits, speaking on condition of anonymity because he hopes to continue producing Broadway hits." Note the diminishing reference to "landlords" rather than "theatre owner" by the brave but anonymous producer.

As sense memory exercise try this. Substitute "piano" for "counting-out room", substitute "mopping" for "restoration" and substitute "flyman" for "credit card fees". Then watch this rewind from the League's Strike Press Conference. If you begin to see their lips moving and nothing coming out, you may or may not have reached a higher state of awareness in your ability to analyze the cycles of the extraction of the surplus value by the owners of capital. In fact,the sound really is dropping out of the video.

I'm Not Saying, I'm Just Saying

I came across this while watching an AFTRA video about the Employee Free Choice Act and the Chicago NBC/Telemundo organizing effort. I'm sure that when NBC, MSNBC, CNBC, CNN, ABC, CBS, NYT, Chicago Tribune, NY Post and all the rest report Rod Blagojevich's indictment they've have forgotten about his support for organizing within the entertainment industry.

Oh wait, here's another one.






I'm sure messing with the Bank of America didn't have anything to do with it either.

On The Bounce

The business is slow right now and there is a lot of fear out there. As workers we’ve been inculcated with fear about our jobs, our future and our status in life since the Reagan administration. The middle class life we knew has moved further and further out of our reach. Rightly or wrongly we measure our self worth by the kind of work we do and when there isn’t any work, we’re diminished.
One of the odd things about this business is working on the bounce. There is a sizable population of our business who work as per-diems or daily hires. Technicians who by design or circumstance live a life determined by the ebb and flow of work calls, holidays, special events, swinging into a show track, one-offs or hotel jobs. Split shifts, back to back to back calls, clockers and short notice calls are all part of the career. Depending on what is going on in you home life will determine how quickly you take any call that comes along. A stagehand with kids and a mortgage isn’t going to get much sleep.
How one copes with financial insecurity often determines the part of this business one goes into. Stagehands sometimes get a basic, full-time job and never venture out of the venue into the rest of the jurisdiction. Others don’t have the skills or the contacts that allow them to get these jobs offered to them in the first place. Still others seem to have the job skills but lack the social skills to stay in one place for very long. Not that there's anything wrong with that.
The hardest part is managing cash flow. After enough time in the business you learn that a steady job often means you can keep a smaller cushion since money is coming in on a steady basis. When your bouncing around, however, you keep a larger cushion because the checks arrive when they arrive. When doing a hotel job you know not to count on the check at the end of the call, the end of the week or even at the end of the month. Corporate jobs often tend to be slow since the payroll has to get invoiced, passed through the production company that hired you, then sent to the client, processed through their invoicing system and checks are then cut. Weeks can pass and sometimes enough time passes that a check comes in the mail that you had forgotten about. Sometimes you end up being fly-by-night operations creditors but the Local is pretty good about that sort of stuff. I’ve gotten ripped off a lot more often without a contract than with one.
It’s a balancing act keeping the bills paid, the calls filled and having a real life. Most of the time when things get out of balance it’s the real life that goes first. There’s no time for family issues or relationships or relaxation. You can’t really relax because every show closes, every job comes to an end and you have to find the next one. More work, a little sleep, another call across town and a quick meal. You get home to change clothes and grab some shuteye. And repeat.
I see fear in people’s eyes now. The cushion is getting smaller or perhaps has disappeared. The calls are fewer and after watching the news or reading their annuity statements, the prospects look grim. However fear is an emotion and not a fact. There is an ebb and flow to show business and to life and we need to keep that in mind. Watch out for people that are trying to play on your emotions, be they politicians, financers or commentators. The wealthy lose a bunch of paper money and it's a depression. Working folks lose their homes and it's a housing bubble. The multinationals that control the levers of power are jockeying for position with these bailouts and playing chicken with the financial system.

I have no idea where it will end up. I do know that we have more survival skills, street smarts. We had to have them in order to get by in the New World Order. Don’t buy what they’re selling. We’ll be alright if we stick together.

Lies, Damned Lies, Statistics and Ratings

I’ve been home ill the last few days and have too much time to think about the current financial crisis and my business as our little drama plays out. Not if the television networks will fail but rather the financial crisis as drama, how it’s presented.

Suppose your boss said to you if you want to keep your job you need to give up your pension and healthcare. What would your reaction be? You can choose to sustain the future or the present, not both. Presented with this Hobson’s choice, mine would be fear. And fear makes for good television.

What if this happens to a neighbor or close friend and confidant? You would be witness to and identify with a basic, existential conflict that you hope never happens to you. Put it on a stage and it’s called drama. Put it on television and it’s called news. You become a witness to an accident in HD.

Over the weekend a reporter corrected an anchor who had repeated the “fact” that the Saudi tanker captured by the Somali pirates was “three times longer than an the largest air craft carrier.” Someone had done some checking and found they were close to the same size. It sounded great, just amazing, but it only bore some semblance to reality. I have not heard this reference since.

“Legacy costs” are this week’s fact. We’re told over and over the damned unions are ruining the American economy with their greedy demands for creature comforts. “$2000 of the price of every Detroit car goes to legacy costs.” “The American economy will collapse if the automakers are allowed to fail.”

Like the story about the size of the tanker, these bromides are passed along with little or no examination by anchors and reporters. They ignore the multinational scope of GM and Ford or the bias of the speakers. One interviewee on CNBC (GE) went unchallenged when he said that this emergency will not pass until a chainsaw is taken to these union contracts (his metaphor, not mine).

I guess you need to be in a television studio or control room to understand just how mechanical the interview process is. A producer is whispering in the earpiece of the anchor who is watching a prompter and trying to ask the questions as a floor manager is pointing to cameras, the director is calling shots and rolling tape, and everybody is listening to the content with a third ear, as it were, for a sound bite they will use later. Which makes the accusation of a bias on network television news so laughable. They are putting on a show, filling hours with talk and there’s little or no time to filter or slant except towards the numbers of eyeballs. “If it bleeds, it leads.” Meltdown or Britney or Iraq or Anna Nicole, the song is sung over and over with only slightly different lyrics. Except for sweeps week when lurid sex is thrown in.

Here’s an interesting article about the Secrets of Talk Radio on how the process works in talk radio land. The medium is different but the end result is the same. Eyeballs, ears and asses in seats.

Television news is entertainment to fill up the space between commercials. And the more you watch, the less you know.

Opposing Viewpoints

Want to know what it's like to be in a television studio for a major news event? Imagine a whirlpool of corporate and political forces. Or black hole, that image will work also. For years and then months, weeks, days and hours, centrifugal forces built from a wide, gentle rotation to an intense tightening of spin. You reach the event horizon where there is not enough energy to reverse course. You're trapped. The spin builds to a point where either gravity tears you apart or you get sucked down and out the other side. You’re on the air.

One of the major drawbacks of being in this business is the distancing I feel from the audience and the illusion I help create. I know what goes into the making the images the public sees and doesn’t really see. I know what’s in the background and how it got there. Yet there are few viewers who really want to talk about camera angles, lighting and scenery. It’s like seeing the brushstrokes and not the painting. Knowing to much.

The election of Barack Obama may be a seminal point in US politics, a change I've wanted to see since the death of Robert Kennedy. However as the election campaign wound down to it's final days and there was electricity in the streets of NYC, I just wanted the damned thing over. There is a tremendous amount of effort that goes into the run up to these major media events that the public doesn't see, work that should go unaccredited, invisible and perfect. As someone who has been fortunate enough earn his living in a fascinating business, I've gotten accustomed to the long, intense hours leading up to going on the air or first curtain and the anticlimax of the applause. But like lawmaking and sausage making, to witness news making close up is to lose one's appetite for it.

The evening of the election, as I was getting teary eyed as the speeches were being made and the celebrations started, I also felt a little cheated. Exhausted to the point of apathy wasn’t where I really wanted to be at this moment in time.

And load out started in the morning.

Plumbers Crack

I was going to post something in-depth and penetrating about class, plumbers and politicians but that Paul Krugman beat me to it in The Real Plumbers of Ohio in the New York Times. I hate when that happens.

Forty years ago, Richard Nixon made a remarkable marketing discovery. By exploiting America’s divisions — divisions over Vietnam, divisions over cultural change and, above all, racial divisions — he was able to reinvent the Republican brand. The party of plutocrats was repackaged as the party of the “silent majority,” the regular guys — white guys, it went without saying — who didn’t like the social changes taking place.

I had a conversation with a youngish ornamental ironworker today. With overtime, he was able to earn enough to stop paying into Social Security and take home an extra $100 to $200 a week. We agreed that in all likelihood, working people were going to continue to get screwed and the economy was going to hell. But we seem to be coming from opposite points of view. Despite these troubled times, he was studiously avoiding looking at how much he was losing in his annuity. I’m closer to retirement so I pay a bit closer attention to the haircut that I’m getting. He was upset because he had "nobody to vote for". New York wasn't going to vote for McCain so he wasn't going to vote at all. He also wanted to have Social Security privatized so he could do his own investing. Evidently doing his own investing by not paying attention to his investments. I think he'd be chum in Wall Street waters.

I see a connection between what Krugman is saying and the guy I talked to today. We have work to do with our union brother and sisters.

Stagehand of Babylon

A couple of folks with to much time on their hands have asked me why I’ve stopped posting. I’ve been blessed with a schedule that has been filled with a lot of work. Those of you in the business know what “busy” means in terms of time constraints. If you don’t, ask you family.

I think many of us like to think that we primarily make our living in the arts or at least on the periphery of it. But even in New York City it sometimes difficult to survive on just a diet of culture. As we get further and further from the hot sun of the fine arts, away from the nourishing atmosphere of Broadway we’ll work in the cold outer planets of “television” and “industrial.” Even these can be satisfying when the technological gee-whiz factor is high enough. A lot of product rollouts and events have a lot of bright, new shiny toys.

So where am I? Out in the cold outer reaches of our universe, there is a distant planet called “Cable.” It can support life but it’s a hardscrabble existence. Orbiting that planet is a lifeless, gray moon called the “Business News Channel“.

Business News Channel is inhabited by a race of people called “Clients”. It’s a soul-sucking place where the end result of a stagehand’s labor is to help tell the rest of the Universe about the importance of the “Market”. The Market and the Clients don’t produce anything. They do, however, talk a lot about how important they are and why they are the “Masters Of The Universe.”

Their main religion is a philosophy called the “Tao”; I believe it’s spelled. A great deal of attention is paid to the daily and even hourly moods of their god. Often you will hear it brightly said, “The Tao was up today” or solemnly “the Tao closed down today”. "The Tao went for a walk on Wall Street."

Space is often warped on Business News Channel. Regularly in the workplace, small groups of Clients will arrive, blink quickly and announce, ”It looks bigger/smaller than I thought it would.” For me, it looks exactly the size it was drawn to be on the blueprints but for the Client there seems to be a problem with perception on many levels. Sometimes color is a major problem. “It’s bluer/darker/flatter than I thought it would be” as if the sample of the color they were shown is not the same color as the one that appeared on the set.

The distortion in perception is not limited to scenery. Their measure of success in life is marked by the acquisition of things. They also seem to believe that a Bank is more important a Bakery. That Commerce is more important than Community. They put Profits before People.

There’s more, so much more and yet so very little. There will come a time when I’ll get off this little moon. As the saying goes, “when the money runs out, so do we”. The Client can hire my body for a couple of hours or days but the money always runs out and that’s my ticket back to sunshine.

Where have I been? I prefer to think about where I’m going, thank you very much.

And so it goes.

Roosting Chickens

Finally politicians are being called for getting the support of religious bigots and extremist wing-nuts. As well they should, No candidate for President, Senate or the House should be allowed to let others spout hatred on their behalf without having to answer for their supporters views or disallow or refute or reject that support. However they want to phrase it. And we're talking about both Presidential candidates. The corporate media is also being taken to task for allowing their bias to show. Obama and Farrakhan? Small potatoes.

In a Salon column, Glenn Greenwald calls on McCain to reject the support of certain neo-conservative, radical evangelicals.

snip

Thus, white evangelical Ministers are free to advocate American wars based on Biblical mandates, rant hatefully against Islam, and argue that natural disasters occur because God hates gay people. They are still fit for good company, an important and cherished part of our mainstream American political system. The entire GOP establishment is permitted actively to lavish them with praise and court their support without the slightest backlash or controversy. Both George Bush and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert sent formal greetings to the 2006 gathering of Hagee's group.

By contrast, black Muslim ministers like Farrakhan, or even black Christian ministers like Rev. Jeremiah Wright, are held with deep suspicion, even contempt. McCain is free to hug and praise the Rev. Hagees of the world, but Obama is required to prove over and over and over and over that he does not share the more extreme views of black Ministers.

How come Tim Russert -- in all the times he sits and chats with Lieberman, McCain and various high Bush officials -- never reads all of the inflammatory, disgusting, crazed "Rapture-is-Coming/ All-Jews-will-Burn/ Kill-All-Muslims/ Hurricanes-are-Punishment-against-Gays" pronouncements from John Hagee and James Dobson and Pat Robertson and demand that John McCain and George Bush and Joe Lieberman "denounce" those views and "reject" their support? What's the difference, exactly?

snip

Good read. Check out the follow-ups. Including the interview with Bill Donohue of the Catholic League (no flamer,he) about the religious intolerance of some of McCains supporters.

You design, we decide.

In my mind, the set I've just loaded-in is representative of the disconnect between the so-called information society and the rest of us. Framed out of tubular steel, it produces the illusion of being very slender while still being very strong. It's also been designed with a CAD program that is a marvel of functionality. It allows for 3D views, cut lists,cost estimates and multiple color combinations that the client can approve of without every leaving their office. It is also usually "drafted" by someone who is much more familiar with a hard drive than a drill press, with the language of software than the language of truck drivers. And when the lack of familiarity with the shop process collides with the computer process, it's the language of truck drivers that is heard the loudest when bolts holes don't line up. When the inexperienced doesn't account for the build up of welds when making joints, things can get loud and profane. It's the workman’s skill that makes the real the symmetry of the beautiful drawing on the dirty, sagging floor of the studio.

In my mind this typifies what is going on in much of the business and political world today. There are business school graduates running businesses who have never even watched people unloading the trucks in the business they're running and would never consider unloading one themselves. To them, a repetitive stress injury is an abstraction that only affects the cost of the health plan and not the reality of not being able to play with the kids after work because of the pain. Because of their income levels, politicians can relate in a real sense to tax brackets but only in an abstract sense to poverty levels because they have never felt the stinging isolation of being poor. Designers with MFA's who are breaking into the entertainment industry by doing computer drafting work aren't going to be able to relate to the shop carpenters or stagehands that are going to work the multiple 16 hour days it will take to build or load in the beautiful drawings.

To complain to the boss will result in some flippant remark about “that if I don’t like it here etc, etc”. At this point I know that his kid’s tuition has been paid for, his greens fees have been paid for and that he thinks that he’s probably immune to being fired. For the new designer, one can only hope that he or she acquires his or her skill without someone getting hurt because of the hacks required to make the illusion real.

As for politicians, I have a new rule of thumb. The candidate who has a net worth that is closest to mine will have my vote. I’ve had enough of Ivy League millionaires trying to tell me that I have to live my life according to their standards which they can apply to themselves at their discretion, meaning if they don’t get caught, it’s okay. The operatives of the two major parties seem to have less and less in common with the people they govern and are not working at improving the lives of the governed. They are skilled at fund raising from major donors, improving the tax code for the said donors and getting the government off “our” backs. By getting the government off our backs they really mean that corporations can have free run over the environment, workers, communities, our retirement system, our military, our health care, our education and then pit us against each other for their cynical ends. Here’s a radical idea. Lets bring the government back. Big badass government. A government that will take tax cheats to court, sues polluters, protects workers, gives us the health care we require, the retirement we’ve earned, the education our children really require and allows all of us to live in peace and prosperity. In the words of Lincoln, “government of the people, by the people, for the people.”

If It's In The Paper It Must Be True

In a Variety article, polls showing that the vast majority of Hollywood professionals feel that the WGA strike is losing cause.

"The town's opinions have budged a bit since the November survey on the question of whether the WGA's decision to go on strike was a "tactical mistake."

Among all respondents, 57% said no while 35% said yes -- not much different than the divide in November (57%-31%). WGA respondents are holding fast, with only 16% agreeing that going on strike was a tactical miscue.

But among DGA respondents, 42% now agree it was a tactical mistake, compared with 34% in November. Doubts among SAG members are also rising, with 25% agreeing that the strike was a tactical mistake, compared with 15% in November. Half of IATSE members are convinced the work stoppage was a tactical error, inching up to 50% from 47% in the November survey."

A lot of figures and percentages are thrown around as proof that the WGA strike is failing and creating a lot of hostility among other entertainment unions. According to Variety, half of all IATSE members are convinced that the dispute is a tactical error. Well, sorta. You see only 616 Variety subscribers responded and of that 616, 7% were IATSE members. So 3 1/2% of all the respondents who also happen to be IATSE members and subscribers thought that the strike was a "tactical mistake". And how many real people are we talking about? 7% of 616 is 44. So half of that is 3.5% or 22 people. Which means that in an industry consisting of hundreds of thousands of people Variety makes a statement that there is a large percentage of opinion against the strike and represents that "half of all IATSE members" are against it. The opinions of 22 PEOPLE now pass as consensus! Looked at another way, with it's circulation estimated at 31,000, Variety is making that statement based on the opinions of 0.07% of it's readership.

I'm not in the middle of the fight but from the outside, thats worse than sloppy, thats disingenuous. That's Corporate Media posing as a free press.