The Weekend in Foolish Attention
Bits and bytes of the week
OLD SCHOOL CELEBRATION. For the solar eclipse, I decided to celebrate the event the way our forebears did thousands of years ago so I slaughtered a goat, burned it in deference to a pagan god, then married an eleven year old girl as my seventh wife. And they say that humanity has not progressed…
BEEN THERE, DONE THAT. After six weeks in Chicago, eight different storytelling shows attended, and hopping up on the tiny stage at O’Shaunessy’s and regaling the crowd with a story about the Wild Wild West, I’m pretty certain I’m done with the whole storytelling thing (at least for the time being). I wanted to get up and see if it had the same magic as years ago. It didn’t. It was fun and I nailed the landing. The folks over there were cool and kind. The other stories were fine. It felt too… shifty in the Age of Personal Branding.
As Bob says, it’s a low overhead kind of art form, so it isn’t like I can’t if I want to but the scene, the politicking, the non-stop branding to be the top dog is just boring. I’m in no rush and as I told myself before I headed back, I’ll focus on some Literate Ape things in the future and, in the meantime, remain curious and enjoy being a spectator.
SPEAKING OF GOING TO SHOWS… Joe is doing a one man (sort of) play at various bookstores in Chicago. It’s entitled Meet the Author and directed by Andi Dymond so I’m comfortable recommending you check it out sight unseen. For the full skinny, go to JoeJanes.net.
Here are the listed dates:
5/16/24 - https://tangiblebookschicago.com/
5/23/24 - https://www.unchartedbooks.com/
5/29/24 - https://www.womenandchildrenfirst.com/
5/30/24 - https://www.bookcellarinc.com/
I’ll be at the first one at Tangible Books so swing by.
LINQUISTICAL MINDCULT. There’s a George Carlin bit about the concept creep of using longer and more complicated therapy-speak to define how completely fucked up we all are. The idea is that the more syllables, the more serious we all are supposed to take it. Hence, bum became hobo which rebranded as homeless which is now housing deprived.
When I was a kid, the teachers at one school told my mother I was hyperactive and needed to take Ritalin. Mom wasn’t into that so I remained a pain in the ass and undrugged. At this point, every human living can credibly self diagnose their own specific PTSD and take a quiz online to determine that they have autism. In a societal model that awards people with mental illness as somehow special and deserving of status, it tracks but I’m just not buying it.
It’s not his lack of commitment; it’s your anxious attachment. It’s not that he criticises you constantly; it’s your rejection sensitivity dysphoria. It’s not that he’s distant with you; it’s your dependent personality disorder. Oh he’s hurting you over and over? Have you considered you’re just a “Highly Sensitive Person”? There’s something tragic about seeing so many young women refracting their relationships through this kind of therapy-speak and losing the language of hurt and disappointment. Listing out terrible things their partners have done and then diagnosing themselves. — Freya India
If everyone is ‘on the spectrum’ then the race to see who is further along said spectrum is afoot. If everyone is afflicted then being afflicted becomes meaningless.
"Confidence in the media has tanked, including among Democrats. It’s a good time for us to look in the mirror."—URI Berliner
If the message you’re sending is so skewed as to alienate this many people, Berliner is 100%. Check your message, check your tone, and adjust.
COCK. Yeah, I wrote it. It’s the title of a play I saw last night. Directed by Wren Wesner (whom I work with in the park) the play, by Mike Bartlett, sets up a Sophie’s Choice of sexuality—John, a gay man, must choose between his long time boyfriend or the straight woman he’s fallen in with. The cock in this case is more about the cockfight and where John prefers to have his.
David Zack’s new space (Open Space Arts, about a three-minute walk from my apartment) is super intimate in that Off Loop theater way I love so much and Werner’s direction of their cast is spot on. A perfect choice to inaugurate myself to the edgy, weird theater that excited me back in the halcyon days.
I know it’s easy to armchair quarterback decisions made under danger and extreme duress when adrenaline and fear are running high and a fellow officer has been shot, but the fusillade of return fire, particularly those several shots that were fired with Reed already face down on the pavement behind his car seems so excessive as to be irrationally frenzied.—Eric Zorn
It was a good week for me. I hope it was for you. As we slowly get into Spring, take a few moments in your day checking out the world around you. Be curious, be amazed, and tell someone about it.
Rock on!
On the one hand, you referenced an all-time favorite Carlin routine and, yeah, as a species, we seem to believe that more syllables improve our lot. (Talk about bullshit!)
On the other hand—and in spite of how much I like its here in LV—I am jealous of all your word-art choices.
I'd knock personal branding as self-conscious twaddle but that would be too hypocritical for a guy who refers to himself as NewMan from NewArk.