So, apparently there’s an old Nintendo game called Stadium Events that’s kind of a big deal. As in, only 800 were ever released, and the people who want one are willing to pay a fortune for it.

A lady with one of those “re-sell yard sale crap” on eBay businesses listed an original NES with five games earlier this month. As it happens, one of those five games was a copy of Stadium Events. Just kind of a golden ticket type thing. The Nintendo collectible gaming community, apparently with saved eBay search notifications set to “stadium events nes”, found out about it quickly. A forum, on NintendoAge.com, pointed the ad out. A few people there posted about how they offered her side-deals for a couple hundred dollars on the game (which she was selling as part of a lot for $9.99), but mostly the forum is full of people looking out for her, inviting her to learn more, and warning her not to let anyone low-ball her. Around page 3 of the post, the seller – a grandmother – turns up, and the forum gets really protective and helpful.

It’s nice, really. I mean, everyone getting excited about the fact that it’s happening, and all of these fanatics who would gladly pay thousands and thousands of dollars for an old video game working with this lady to make sure she gets a fair deal. Not important, in any sense of the word, but just neat to see a bunch of random Internet people put away greed and opt for a bit of kindness. Presumably they were also interested in learning exactly what the game is worth these days, but curiosity and kindness are often intertwined, so it’s cool.

Incidentally, the game sold for a little over $13,000.

When I was nineteen, I worked in a record store. Not like a High Fidelity thing – it was just the Sam Goody in the mall in the Rio Grande Valley. I had a manager there named Eddie. Nice dude, kind of a cokehead, in his early thirties. Long-haired rocker guy, could kick your ass at Guns N Roses pinball. Would have ruled at Rock Band, too, if it’d been around back when dinosaurs roamed the earth.

Anyway, Eddie spent a lot of his time going to concerts – he’d drive to San Antonio or Houston or Austin, whatever it took, to see Queensrÿche on their latest tour. The guy loved Queensrÿche. And man, was he stoked when Sammy Hagar came to the Valley for a show. He had strong opinions about the latest Dream Theater record, too.

It wasn’t that Eddie ignored all new music, he just wasn’t really interested in new music that wasn’t made by people whose records came out when he was younger. A new Queensrÿche record? Eddie was first in line, listened to it a dozen times the first weekend he had it, really gave a shit about it.

I’m turning thirty this year, and I’m afraid of becoming Eddie. I’ve only heard a handful of 2010 records so far, and all of ‘em are by musicians whose records I was listening to, like, ten years ago. They’re pretty good and all – the new Retribution Gospel Choir album’s real strong, and the Eels record is kind of a bummer, but in a nice way. I love that Lil Wayne rock record too, without a lick of irony (though apparently I’m in the minority there), and I’m just about to check out the new Massive Attack, which looks promising.

And I could have written pretty much that same paragraph back when I worked with Eddie.

So, um, help? Give me new music. Give me things with 2010 release dates, preferably made by people who were too young to ever be on Friendster – maybe even on MySpace. Because here’s a thing – unless you’re Tom Waits, your sixteenth album is not going to be anywhere near as good as your third. I want music that’s not just new to me, but new. I want to figure out what 2010 sounds like.

About a year and a half ago, Glenn Beck did this bit that I thought, at the time, was the dumbest thing ever written. I was googling for some specific info on health care reform today, and I found a link to his site. I thought I’d click on it because – in all sincerity – I’m so mad about this, I thought it’d be neat if this were actually the one spot on the Venn diagram on which Beck and I overlap.

It’s not. But he does manage to make a comparison to the NFL again – as he did in the previous bit – that’s supposed to be convincing, but which is actually totally fucking clueless about the subject on which he speaks.

This time out, he compares the NFL’s helmet policy to health care, insisting that, since players in the NFL get the best helmets in the world, they’re reckless when playing and thus get more concussions. In Australia, meanwhile, they don’t wear helmets, and are therefore cautious, meaning they suffer 25% fewer concussions – and uninsured Americans are just like Australian footballers, being super cautious not to do anything that can get them sick.

While that’s absolutely absurd on its face, it gets dumber when you notice two important details.

1. There are twice as many teams in the NFL as in the Australian Football League, nearly a thousand more players, and the season involves 80 more games.

2. American football and Australian football are two totally different games that just have the same name. This would be like insisting that American poker, where you sit around a table and play cards, is safer than Australian poker, which I just made up, and in which players bash each other in their helmeted heads with fireplace pokers, because Americans are naturally more cautious when engaging in sport. The reason there are fewer head injuries in Australian football is because giant men aren’t running into each other from dozens of yards away at full speed. They don’t do that because the games are totally different and one of them is naturally less likely to cause head injuries.

So, yeah. It’s not exactly news that Glenn Beck is a fucking idiot, but it makes me feel better, sometimes, to point it out.

The civil war among the American left on health care reform is pretty fascinating to watch right now. And, okay, to participate in, because I have a pretty strong opinion on the matter. There’s one thing that’s continued to rankle me through this whole process of seeing the bill watered down, watered down again, and then watered down some more, all ostensibly at Joe Lieberman’s behest: The idea is that Lieberman, as the potential 60th vote for cloture to end a filibuster of the bill, must get it the way he likes it. If he doesn’t get the bill he wants, he’ll vote to filibuster with the Republicans, and the bill dies. So out goes the public option, out goes the Medicare buy-in, out goes the 90% provision, etc, etc.

But that 60th vote isn’t something Lieberman has because he was, like, the 60th Senator voted into office or something. It’s because the 58 Democrats in power, along with Bernie Sanders, are taken for granted as voting yes, no matter what. So Rahm Emmanuel says things like, “Just give him what he wants” about Lieberman when meeting with the Senate leaders, because they want this thing passed by Christmas. And then they insist, like Jay Rockefeller did today, that “you don’t get everything you want”.

But, um, it looks like Joe Lieberman gets everything he wants. So what’s stopping, say, Bernie Sanders, or Russ Feingold, or Al Franken, or one of the other of a handful of Senators who seems to find this bill as wretched as those on my side of the civil war do, from saying, “Check me out – I’m the 60th vote now, we do it my way or I’m going to filibuster, too.”

(It’s a rhetorical question*, in case you were going to reply. And the answer isn’t “Bernie Sanders is a sell-out”.)

*”Nothin’ retardical about it.”

Crap, did that thing again where I forget to update this blog for a while, then let it take on some weird significance because I waited so long, and I don’t want to update until I have something meaningful to say. I won’t promise to be more consistent here, but, um – hi! How are y’all? How was Thanksgiving?

There’s been a bit of news that I suppose I ought to report (though if you follow me on twitter or google reader or wherever, you’ve probably figured it out)–anyway, I received an email from my editor at Austinist about six weeks ago asking me if I wanted to “step up my relationship” with the site. Which isn’t as sexy as it sounds – I was offered, and accepted, the position of theatre editor. Which has been an interesting, and fun, experience. I’ve come to understand more about what my editors do every day, and I care a lot about the theatre community in Austin, so I’m enjoying the expanded platform. I may even run some positive reviews at some point. I really, really want to.

I also started freelancing with AOL’s men’s-interest site Asylum.com, which has been a fucking blast. Basically, anytime now I see, hear, or read something that sounds vaguely weird or fucked up, I can call up a person involved, or a person who’s likely to know a lot about it, and then write it down and get paid. For instance: An atheist who promises that he’ll rescue your pets after you get raptured away if you pay him $130 right now? Or maybe a classics professor who can tell me about A-Rod’s centaur fetish? It’s been a whole bunch of fun, and I’ve only been at it for about two months, so I’m guessing it’ll get to be more so in the future.

Also still with the A.V. Club, doing arts and entertainment writing for the Austin edition and the same, plus a bunch of stuff about football, for the Chicago branch. And contributing a couple pieces a month to MadeLoud.com, which is a neat music site that some folks I know are operating. And working on the blog for Sumpter & Gonzalez, too. All of which is to say that I am really fucking busy, but pretty happy about it. 

So how’re you? We never talk anymore.

Dear every asshole who supports the Max Baucus mandate-based health care plan on the justification that the government mandates that you must have car insurance, too:

The government only mandates that you have car insurance if you choose to drive. It’s not the same thing. If you can’t afford to keep up with car insurance, you can choose not to drive and keep your expenses low.

I really like John Aravosis over at AmericaBlog.com (if you find yourself here after following a trackback, dude, sorry) but that post linked up there, and its defense in the comments section, is flat-out wrong. The logic behind it is crappy. Saying, “you already spend money on optional things like CDs, and that’s not a tax” is totally beside the point. If there were a law in place that could see me fined for not buying enough CDs, then the two would be comparable. That law’s not in place, because it’d be fucking stupid. Just like the analogy. Which is why it’s not one I’ve ever heard before, probably.

But the thing about car insurance that keeps getting brought up is just infuriating. Because it’s from such a privileged position – from people who’ve apparently never had to consider whether or not they could afford to keep a car.

For many years, I didn’t have a car. Not because I couldn’t afford to buy one – I spent most of my late teens and early twenties chewing up and spitting out $300 junkers – but because the ancillary costs, like insurance and gas and fuzzy dice and spinning rims and stuff were too much of an investment.

And I was a privileged white kid with no dependents, and my poverty was a choice that I made because I wanted to pursue opportunities that I knew wouldn’t make me any money. There are people who are really, really poor, without the option of just throwing in the towel and getting a job that would pay their bills, like I had. And those people sometimes can’t afford to drive because they can’t afford car insurance, too.

And so telling them that they have to buy health insurance now or they’re going to be fined, but it’s cool, because it’s just like how they already have to buy car insurance for the car that they don’t have, is not particularly convincing. The stats people keep spouting about how it’s an insignificant amount of money – about how the Baucus plan only requires people who live at the federal poverty line to spend 3% of their total income, which is like $300 a year, on insurance, so who gives a shit because it’s only like an extra $25 a month, and all the poor people can just have two fewer glasses at the wine bar on Friday nights, is so fucking clueless that Marie Antoinette hears them say it and is like, “dudes, time to check your privilege before you say some really dumb shit.”

(Not that it matters too much now, but this post contains some spoilers for the final performances of No One Else Will Ever Love You.)

Here are seven things I’ve learned since stepping into the director’s role at the beginning of this project:

1. As a journalist, especially an arts writer, it’s easy to forget the difference between working constantly on a zillion small projects and working for a sustained period on a single large one. It’s not that one is inherently more satisfying than the other – though I’d be lying if I said that I didn’t enjoy the sustained charge of writing a book or directing a play – but it’s a privileged position, to be writing about. It takes me, on average, 3-4 hours to review a play. An hour or two to watch it, maybe another hour to talk about it with Kat or whoever my +1 was, and to roll it around in my head, and then an hour to type it. With that inherent imbalance in the time commitment in criticism as compared to creating even a very modest work –whether it’s theater reviewing or mp3 blogging or literary criticism – it’s really vital to never be lazy when crafting a response to the piece. It’s okay to hate the piece. It’s okay to call out a loathsome piece of art as being awful. But it’s not okay to do so lazily, because you’re up against a deadline, or because you’re tired, or because you were in a bad mood when you saw it. Snark has no place in criticism – which is a shame, because it’s easy and fun, and the common idiom of the Internet. But it’s only fair in an even exchange. A three minute song takes more time to write than it does to listen to and review, so it’s not fair to be dismissive of it. That imbalance is only magnified when you move onto theater, or film, or – for fuck’s sake – books. You don’t have to be nice, but if you can’t be thoughtful about why something sucks, you probably haven’t got much of a place at the conversation.

2. This cast is genuinely incredible. I know that’s something everyone is supposed to say about every group of people ever assembled for any project ever, but speaking with critical objectivity*, it’s true: They’ve taught me some of how to do this job, and they’ve done it with grace and humor and through the hard work of indulging my bad ideas, reacting to my good ones, and helping me learn to identify the difference. I couldn’t have asked for a group that was more willing to explore the script with me, and by extension, teach me how big a part of the director’s job that is.

3. My wife is a remarkable writer. No, seriously. I spent a lot of time with her in the writing process of this script – she started it years ago, and it’s been through a number of iterations. And, as she finally narrowed in on a final draft at the beginning of the summer, I spent a lot of time talking through the structure with her, just like she helped me talk through the second half of In The Time In Between. Since I was so intimately involved in the writing process, I assumed that I knew every trick of the script, and that my initial understanding of each line was all there was to it. But there are no throwaway lines here. Pieces of dialogue that I thought were insignificant are actually subtle bombs she planted to explode the characters’ self-perception, and every moment in the working process that led us to discover a "he’s the one who sent us on our honeymoon" or "We’ve been engaged two weeks, okay?" has been a new chance to be impressed with how effortlessly talented she is at crafting characters and telling a story through dialogue. I’m humbled by her talent.

4. A year of dealing constantly with editors has made me way less sensitive that I thought I’d be, especially as it relates to bad reviews. We received four reviews for No One Else Will Ever Love You. One was very short and more Yelp-y, and it doesn’t really require much thought. Two of the others said mostly the same things, though one liked the fact that the characters had little backstory available and one thought it was a weakness of the script, and the last one gave that shit the finger. I generally feel pretty good about all four reviews, and took none of them personally. Which is a nice feeling, given that putting yourself out there is the point of doing these things. It’s better to respond to that well.

5.My favorite things about the performances:

• Bastion Carboni has a mostly unlikeable character as Charlie. He’s petulant and argumentative and self-obsessed, and there’s a part of the script that was written to display his deep insecurity. He re-enters the scene having just been out for a cigarette with Karina’s character, Jen, whom he loathes, and as it’s written he comes back a nervous wreck, agreeing to let Jen take over the wedding because he’s scared that if he doesn’t, he won’t know how to do it and it’ll never happen. Bastion completely flipped that interpretation on its head, and instead comes back from having talked to her about it positively giddy with the fact that they’ve announced their wedding to his fiancee, Nora’s, friends. What I’d have played as another chance to show what a loser this guy is, Bastion played as a moment to show him as genuine and human.
• Karina Dominguez really inhabited Jen, and the physicality that she brings to the role is so much fun to watch every night. Rather than seek an alternate interpretation for the character, she embraced her fully. There’s a moment near the end when she’s asking to be put to bed, and she holds her hands out, expecting to be picked up, and it’s the most subtle and emasculating thing she does, setting up beautifully the scene that follows it, which she’s not even in. She’s an actor who works for the other characters in the script, and it’s something that makes her a huge asset to have on stage.
• Spencer Driggers completely exceeded my expectations for what Rick, the yuppie asshole, could be. Because on the page, again, he’s just a yuppie asshole, and even when he’s annoyed or frustrated, he’s still easy to see as being always in control. When Kat and I were first talking about this play, she had offered the part of Rick to a friend of hers whom she had been in another show with. When I agreed to direct it, I made the tough decision to rule him out and go after Spencer, because I was really confident that he’d bring a lot of humanity to Rick that it would be so easy to lose. There’s a moment at the end where Rick’s emotionally vulnerable for the first time, as Nora’s yelling at him, and he yells back, and it says something about their relationship that was never on the page (and which wouldn’t work on the page) - it says this is hard for him too. And that moment, when you can empathize with that guy, is the reason I think this play works as more than just awful people doing awful things to one another.
• Jennymarie Jemison, as the lead and clear protagonist, had the toughest role, as she’s playing a character who’s largely absent in the script. All of the actors had a few key defining characteristics that were clear from their first appearance on the page to work from, and Jenny’s character is defined by her tendency to shrink, which is difficult to perform while still maintaining the role of the protagonist. I think she could play every role in everything. If I got a press release tomorrow from someone who announced that they were doing a production of Twelve Angry Men as a one-person solo show, and Jenny were playing every part, I’d be like, that’s a fucking good idea. She takes a part that could have easily been played as a shrinking violet and turns her into a reflection of what’s going on with the characters around her. You can follow the entire through-line of the play by watching her eyes. Every actor pushed both him- or herself - and me - to look beyond the obvious, surface interpretation of these people as airheads, or assholes, or pretentious goofballs, and turn them into living people whose choices, while sometimes inexcusable, are nonetheless understandable. Jenny’s character had no surface interpretation - she was given very little definition as a choice made by the script, and the way that she turned her into a real person, confined by the fact that she’s been unable to define herself, is what makes the entire play work for me.

6. Theater really is a unique and powerful artform. I knew that. I mean, I’d seen work that resonated with me in really powerful ways before. But I don’t think I totally understood the visceral impact of doing it live in front of you until I had a hand in it, and saw why things work in this setting that might not work otherwise. That’s something I owe to the more negative reviews that we got, too - things that don’t always work on an intellectual level succeed on a visceral one, and having the ability to tap into that, to make people uncomfortable as they’re watching a woman get slapped in the face by a man five feet away, to have a screaming fight go on right in front of you, that’s something that isn’t duplicated by any other medium. I know that all y’all who actually studied this shit have read all the theory about this, but learning it firsthand, learning that it doesn’t matter so much how you intellectualize an experience that can hit you hard in the moment, and learning that it’s unique to this one medium - it’s a really exciting thing to understand fully. I’ve always loved live performance, but I’m getting an even firmer grasp now on why.

7. I’ve been a solo act for almost my entire creative/artistic life. As a performer, I’ve limited myself to the one man show. As a writer, I’ve embraced non-collaborative forms almost exclusively, whether it’s as a novelist or a poet or a journalist. I’ve never really had the opportunity to collaborate on a project like this before, and I’ve been a full-time creative-person for many years now. It’s an entirely different kind of rewarding to be part of something that’s bigger than the sum of its parts, and I’m delighted that I’ve been able to share this experience with the people that I have. I genuinely have no idea if I want to do this again - at the end of the rehearsal process, I was pretty sure that I did, because it’s such a thrill to work collaboratively and explore telling a story with such insightful and fun people. As distance has passed between then and now, though, I’m exhausted, and inviting that exhaustion in again is a little bit daunting. Whether this was a diversion or a thing I’ll pursue, though, it’s going to inform so much of what I do going forward. I’m really glad that I had the chance to do it.

And that’s a lot of lessons to take from any experience. It’s funny - this was never anywhere close to on my radar. When I told my friends that I was doing it, they were mostly like, uh… a play? It’s like I told them that I had decided to become a race car driver or a high school football coach or something. I mean, I like theater, and cars, and football - but this is a level of commitment to it that I didn’t expect to make. And regardless of everything else, it’s good to find that there are whole new things that you can try. That high school football team better look out.

*Kidding, there’s no such thing.

Yeah, I slept totally awesome last night. No anxiety dreams here. Nuh-uh.

Also: 100 minutes until call time. Still need a run to the supermarket and CopyMax.

Also, also: I take a rare trip to the other side of the voice recorder in an interview conducted by Bastion Carboni for Austinist.