Business, News

Steve Jobs, Mike Daisey, and the Perils of Lionizing

August 26, 2011 Michael van Baker 1 Comment

When the news broke that Steve Jobs was stepping down as CEO of Apple, there was shock at first, followed swiftly by a barrage of encomiums. There’s a lot to praise about Jobs, but the internet was, I think, up to the task.

More than once, though, I saw people on Twitter wondering what Mike Daisey would say.

Honorary Seattleite Daisey, of course, is the monologuist who created The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, which he’s still performing. It’s coming to The Public Theater in October. (Nearer to home, Daisey is coming to Portland for TBA this September, to present a 24-hour monologue.)

Agony is, among other things, an interrogation of the tendency to personalize the corporation and corporatize personal responsibility. On the one hand, after his resignation, people apparently needed to be reminded that Apple employed other executives, as if Jobs was down there assembling every Mac and iPad. On the other, did anyone expect Steve Jobs to end Apple’s outsourcing? Does anyone blame him, in any way, for the suicides at Foxconn?

Daisey hasn’t blogged his thoughts (yet). But Michael Moore has. Specifically, MichaelMoore.com is home to this admonitory post: “Remembering Steve Jobs’ Record on Workers’ Rights“. Author Elk writes, pointedly, “While Jobs’ designs for computers may have put humans at their center, working conditions for Apple’s workers put profits at their center.”

Lest you think that only rabble-rousers care about working conditions, remember that back in February, Redfin’s Glenn Kelman wrote this compelling post: “This is really bad, someone should be in China driving this.” (Kelman’s blogging is often compelling for its insight–here it’s the bluntness of his diagnosis of values that’s outstanding.)

You pay more for an Apple product because of how it makes you feel when you buy it: as if you’re striking a blow for creativity over corporatism, even fascism. That feeling is Steve Jobs’s greatest achievement. It probably accounts for a third of Apple’s market value. So when we try to convince ourselves that Apple doesn’t care what we think of Foxconn, we’re hoping to be more powerless than we are.

Daisey remains an invested Apple customer. His August 18 post is simply a quote from macintouch.com on the lousiness of the Mac OS Lion. Scott Boone wrote: “I’ve been pretty quiet about it, but Lion is a mess. I’m finding bugs almost daily; some are small, some are real head scratchers how they got thru QA.” (I can confirm that Lion’s RAM usage is much more prone to spinning-beachball-creation than Snow Leopard.)

But you can’t say Daisey has been quiet on the subject of Jobs; his monologue says what he wanted to say. That is, I think, the same point that Kelman was trying to make. Steve Jobs didn’t invent our ability to ignore working conditions in far-off lands. He just showed us that it’s a user issue.

Arts & Entertainment, Theatre

Balagan Theatre Cast as an “Off-Broadway” Impresario

August 26, 2011 Michael van Baker 9 Comments

The Seattle Times reported the good news recently that Balagan Theatre finally has a place to lay its collective head again, after “outgrowing” its home in the basement of Boom Noodle, on Capitol Hill. Balagan has been tapped to manage the Erickson Theatre Off-Broadway, owned by Seattle Central Community College.

As a Seattle Central spokesperson explained to CHS:

The Broadway Management Group has had the contract to manage both theatres (BPH and Erickson). However, that contract expires in Sept. and by state rules we must issue an RFP and go through a competitive process to award a new contract. A committee of the college decided to award the BPH contract to the Broadway Management Group and the Erickson contract to Balagan.

As you know, nothing can happen in Seattle’s arts community without an outbreak of paranoid conspiracy theory, often based on people knowing next to nothing about the details. So no surprise there’s already a Save the Erickson page on Facebook. A Seattle Dances post says, based on no evidence provided in the post: “Seattle’s best, most professional, most affordable theatre for small dance companies might be going bye-bye.” [UPDATE: Apology here.]

It is highly unlikely that a single small theatre could hog the Erickson, of course. Small companies are usually struggling to put on the few short runs of shows they can afford to present. Besides dance companies, the Erickson’s tenants have included the highly regarded Strawberry Theatre Workshop and the New Century Theatre Company, without previous public complaint.

Meanwhile, on the Slog post about the move, Annex Theatre’s more due-diligent Chris Comte has questions about the lack of local visibility of the RFP, and Balagan’s qualifications:

…the RFP specifically seeks a PROFESSIONAL MANAGEMENT COMPANY to run the space, and not a VOLUNTEER-RUN PRODUCING ORGANIZATION to both operate the space and use it as a home base for their own productions, which would seem to present a glaringly obvious conflict-of-interest, since SCCC will not only be paying Balagan to run the Erickson, but will now, in effect, be subsidizing their productions to a significant degree.

Comte seems to be reading ahead, here, as I don’t think he’s seen the agreement specifics. It is also true that, generally, it’s easy to be envious of Balagan’s good fortune while being in no way prepared or interested in accepting the duties and headaches of a management company.

I contacted Jake Groshong, Balagan’s executive director, to see about Balagan’s planned usage. Groshong, who has an MFA in Arts Leadership from Seattle University, said he was aware there was anxiety about the change, but offered this reassurance:

Balagan will use it for our own productions only in 4 or 5 months out of the year. We want to see the place used as a true community venue that is accessible to the students, arts groups, and community at-large. This means not blocking off huge chunks of time when only one company can use it as much as possible. In fact, with the rentals we’re inheriting, we’re likely to get a max of 3 productions in the space for the first year. So overall, I think Balagan will use the space about 80 to 120 days/year.

Rather than complain about the change in management, I want to suggest that Groshong is right that the Erickson needs to become a “true community venue”–it’s central to Capitol Hill but tucked away between Pike and Pine on Harvard. It’s a great theatre for small companies, with 133 seats, but often they aren’t filled because small companies don’t have, singly, marketing budgets that can reach mainstream.

If “the Erickson” can become a known destination for Capitol Hill arts performance, then there are efficiencies in terms of cross-promotion and audience building. It might be possible to run some performances in repertory, to further build audience traffic. Certainly a shared home would give three small theatre companies reason to collaborate on back-end services that otherwise would be triplicated.

For a while, I’ve been asking companies to consider the benefits of separating distinct artistic goals and visions from everything it takes to produce them: support staff, lighting grids, box offices. Where there are physical realities that support this, it seems like a cooperative structure is the best way for arts groups to allocate resources. If this emerges bottom-up, out of Balagan Management, it would be a great thing for the arts in general.

UPDATE: Thanks to Chris Comte, who would like you to know his comments on Slog are on his own behalf, we have a link to the RFP (pdf), which I don’t believe either of the two existing tenant companies, Strawberry Theatre Workshop or New Century Theatre Company, were provided with any notice of. It appears Seattle Central Community College didn’t feel that was warranted. Once again, renters get screwed.

That said, the RFP itself asks only for a “qualified respondent to privately manage, market,
staff, maintain and make improvements to the Erickson Theater,” and most if not all of the requirements they list are something any theatre company would be familiar with.

Further, far from establishing a fiefdom, the RFP requires the management provider to:

…book events and promote services that will significantly expand both the numbers as well as the variety of plays, concerts, and other events held at the facilities, in keeping with the SCCC’s mission and values.

Also, I’m told that the management contract is open to rebidding each year. All that is required is for another company to express an interest in managing the Erickson. As I say, though, venue management is hard work. If you think Balagan has snagged a stealth residency, that’s one thing. If you think that Balagan has just snagged an enormous amount of extra work, as I tend to, that’s another.

In closing, wouldn’t it be wonderful if all three theatre companies (and any dance companies interested) worked on forming a Erickson-specific management company, one that was a distinct legal entity from the arts groups? (Perhaps something on the order of the non-profit partnership known as Beethoven, which consists of the Seattle Symphony, Seattle Opera, and ArtsFund.) If artists aren’t willing to experiment with socialism, who will?

News, Science

All Powered Up, No Space Elevator Cable to Climb

August 25, 2011 Michael van Baker

This August 11th to 14th, Microsoft played host to the 2011 Space Elevator Conference. The theme for this year was “Developing Stronger, Lighter Tethers–30 MegaYuris or Bust!” (To refresh your memory, one Mega-Yuri = one GPa-cc/g.) On that front, it was “Bust.”

The idea is that by building a 100,000-kilometer carbon nanotube ribbon, with one end on Earth and the other in orbit, we could more easily ship supplies off-world. Depending on the tensile strength of the elevator “cable” in question, it might weigh anywhere between 900 and 50 tons.

Annalee Newitz attended the conference, and summed up the sobering reality:

Every year at the Space Elevator Conference, people bring carbon nanotube fibers and compete to see which can withstand the greatest strain before breaking. Winners stand to gain over a million dollars from NASA in its “strong tether” competition; sadly, this year, nobody had fibers that were strong enough to place…

The upshot is that no one has discovered how to turn nanotube fibers into a non-nano, workable material. Since we need 100,000 kilometers of it, this is a sticking point.

Meanwhile, the power side proceeds by leaps and bounds. Back in 2009, we met up with Kent’s LaserMotive after they won NASA’s power-beaming competition. Even crippled, their climber set a world speed record. Last year, they went on to power a small quadcopter’s flight for over twelve hours, using their combination of high-efficiency photovoltaic cells and near-infrared lasers to transmit energy. (“Invisible extension cords” is how they make “high-powered laser” sound friendlier.)

The AscTec Pelican looks like a toy copter, but it’s not. It’s an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV), and can carry 500 grams of payload (a camera, for instance). Normally it would stay in flight for 20 minutes.

LaserMotive is now one of ten winners of the 2011 CTSI Defense Energy Challenge (that’s the Department of Defense), out of 220 entrants. Keeping unmanned drones aloft in challenging territory is something the DoD is keen on. (“Do you know how many people have died delivering gasoline?” is how Tom Nugent, LaserMotive president and co-founder, framed a key benefit of laser-beamed power for MSNBC.)

NASA also remains impressed, inviting LaserMotive to their NASA Day on the Hill back in June, even though LaserMotive isn’t a NASA contractor.

It’s hard not to feel like we’re on the cusp of a power revolution, when considering what LaserMotive has accomplished already. When NASA writes: “Using solar power limits the places on Mars that landed rover missions can explore,” you think, But not for long.

Currently, power beaming is limited to about one kilometer, but it’s early days on the frontier. LaserMotive’s Dr. Jordin Kare argues that just as space-based telescopes opened our eyes to what’s really out there, space-based solar collectors that lase energy down would blow our minds on the true potential of solar power, whether those satellites are powering microwaves here or rovers on Mars.

We here at The SunBreak are big boosters of solar power, but we are not crazy. Solar power, for instance, doesn’t work as well at night. (Or, as mentioned, during winter on Mars.) Solar power is affected by the atmosphere–clouds cut down on solar transmission, as many Seattleites have the pallor to prove. Geosynchronous, solar-collector satellites would keep the sun turned on 24/7, then deliver the results wherever needed.

Back here on Earth, present-day, the usefulness of one-kilometer, line-of-sight extension cords is apparent. “Electrical power lines are expensive to install ($20,000 or more per mile for low power residential lines, and $250,000 or more per mile for high-voltage transmission lines),” points out LaserMotive, helpfully. It would be a particularly trenchant irony if wars over oil were the testing ground for a power transmission source that led us to fully harness solar energy.

Drinks, Food, Restaurant, Travel

Passport to Pleasure: Afternoon on Alberni in Vancouver

August 25, 2011 Jay Friedman

Vancouver… a city full of Calvin Klein underwear models?

This might not be your typical scene in Vancouver, especially after summer ends, but we have a few more weeks before that becomes a worry. Now’s the perfect time to visit our international neighbor to the north.

It’s a beautiful city with wonderful scenery, parks, shops, and restaurants—all the makings for a romantic getaway. With so much to do, we just need a little focus. So let’s spend an afternoon on Vancouver’s Alberni Street, where we stamp this week’s Passport to Pleasure—a hedonistic quest for great food and good times for two.

COAST IN FOR LUNCH

Coast restaurant brings the bounty of the ocean to the downtown dining scene, and is the first stop of your afternoon on Alberni. You can choose to eat al fresco on the outdoor patio, or go inside to the elegant, multi-level dining room.

Coast offers seafood platters that are perfect for you and your partner to share. The signature chilled platter contains sashimi, a sushi roll, and a variety of shellfish—including freshly shucked oysters, half of an Atlantic lobster, and half of a Dungeness crab—along with some sauces for dipping.

If you’d rather focus on raw fish, there are signature tiles with nigiri sushi. (Look for the mango California roll, with real Dungeness crab and avocado. Even if you don’t normally like rolls, this is a good one.) And if you prefer your seafood warm, consider the signature seafood platter with halibut, wild sea tiger prawns, sockeye salmon, and Qualicum scallops. The seafood is piled on a plate with seasonal vegetables, and comes with a side bowl of potato gnocchi.

Of course, you can also order a la carte off the menu, which features salads, sandwiches, fish and chips, and more—including a delightful smoked salmon flat bread. You’ll feel good knowing that Coast affiliates with Ocean Wise, making ocean-friendly, sustainable seafood choices.

SHOP TO SHOWER EACH OTHER WITH GIFTS

One of the main sensual attractions of Alberni Street has long been Agent Provocateur, but the store unfortunately closed in the past month. (You can still see their incredible ad campaigns and shop for lingerie online, or visit one of the boutiques in other major cities in the U.S. and around the world.) Instead, you’ll have to settle for the Calvin Klein Underwear store just next door to buy sweet surprises.

If it’s outerwear you’d like to gift each other, there’s a Hermes shop at the corner of Alberni and Burrard. Or if diamonds are your girl’s (or partner’s) best friend, head across the street to Tiffany & Co. Okay, they both have Burrard addresses, but they’re essentially on Alberni, and both offer opportunities for romantic splurge shopping.

GET TURNED ON AT THE ART GALLERY

If you could continue on Alberni Street one block east through Burrard, it would take you right into the Vancouver Art Gallery.

And if you can make it there in the next month, go.

The Color of My Dreams: Surrealist Revolution in Art exhibit runs through September 25, so you have one more month to catch it. The exhibit borrows from collections both private and public (like the Guggenheim, The Museum of Modern Art, and the Centre George Pompidou), bringing together 350 works by 50 leading surrealist artists, including Salvador Dali, Rene Magritte, and Edith Rimmington.

Of particular interest for this Passport to Pleasure is the “Anatomies of Desire” section of the exhibit, featuring the works of Man Ray, Max Ernst, Joan Miro, and many more. The paintings (and some sculptures) will have you questioning the meaning of sexual normality, and will be fodder for talk about erotica. The work of Czech surrealist Jindřich Štyrský is especially intriguing. Pictured is Ithall Colquhoun’s “The Pine Family,” which explores androgyny and gender dynamics.

A very stimulating exhibit, in many ways…

THIERRY MAKES (AND TAKES) THE CAKE

Vancouver has long lacked a quality downtown destination for morning pastries and late-night desserts. As of last week, the problem is solved on both fronts.

Thierry Busset, former pastry chef at Cin Cin and West, spent years developing the concept for his new chocolaterie/patisserie. Now open, it’s appropriately named Thierry, part of the Top Table family of restaurants. After your stroll through the museum, Thierry is the perfect place to sit down with a coffee drink (made with the exclusive Thierry Espresso Blend), some flavored liquid chocolate, cold house-pressed juice, or a glass of wine. And while sandwiches are available at lunchtime, you’ll probably be ready for something sweet.

How to decide? You’ll have to do a little window shopping. Like a jewelry store, the showcases are one level only—and they’re temperature controlled for their specific contents. Will you have some of Thierry’s specialty chocolates? A cake or a tart? (Pictured is the lime mousse cake.) Or maybe a sampling of the captivatingly colorful macarons? (They’re gluten-free!) This only scratches the surface of what’s available.

Enjoy the warmth of this classic-yet-modern café with its curved walls of palmwood and drip-from-the-ceiling light fixtures. You’ll relish thoughts of your romantic afternoon on Alberni, realizing that you’ve got until midnight to return to Thierry for a sweet finish to the day.

Arts & Entertainment, Theatre

Andrew Russell and the Intiman in October

August 25, 2011 Michael van Baker

“I’m a little dumbfounded,” I wrote Bruce Bradburn, Intiman’s board chair, “that there’s not been a full public accounting prior to what sounds like a praiseworthy attempt to reinvent the theatre artistically.”

I’d just read Misha Berson’s story in the Seattle Times, on Intiman’s plans to reopen with Andrew Russell at the helm (while wishing Berson had asked a business reporter to collaborate):

Russell’s goal for 2012 is to establish a loose collective of playwrights, directors, actors, designers and others to devise projects for Intiman to produce, in a short “micro-season” mounted next summer.

Russell came to Intiman in 2009, from New York, to take the position of Associate Producer; he also conceived and directed The Thin Place, a show that was more interesting, I think, to talk about later than to sit through. More recently he staged the Seattle Men’s Chorus production of Jake Heggie‘s For a Look or a Touch, a work originally commissioned by Seattle’s Music of Remembrance.

Still, nothing in the announcement of Russell as consulting artistic director cast new light on how Intiman planned to reinvent itself as a company that wouldn’t financially crash and burn in spectacularly public fashion. Last fall, Intiman’s managing director left abruptly, a substantial amount of debt was “discovered,” and a desperate fundraising drive’s “success” was followed by the news that Intiman would close its doors.

While initially the Board claimed that it was “Shocked! Shocked!” at this evident gambling with Intiman’s financial future, it also developed that at least part of the Board had approved spending down millions of dollars from Intiman’s endowment over the past few years (it’s now been entirely spent on retiring debt).

The decision to hire Russell as consulting artistic director is a very preliminary step, Bradburn told me. In October, the full plan for the theatre will be revealed. That’s when Russell and the Board will present their artistic and business strategy to arts funders and to the Seattle Center, which remains on the hook for rent for the Intiman Playhouse. (Bradburn also disputed the accuracy of some of the points I raised in my email–though of course the Board has yet to release an official audit of the crisis, which would make accuracy a little easier to come by.)

With these early details, you get the impression that Intiman plans to follow in ACT Theatre’s footsteps, which is not surprising since they’re being advised by consultant Susan Trapnell, author of ACT’s near-death turnaround. In particular, Intiman may become as much a hosting venue as a self-producing one, though (since Intiman doesn’t own the Playhouse) it remains to be seen if that’s as financially helpful as it is for ACT Theatre.

Another thing that may strike loyal Intiman-goers as strange (besides the members of the original “hold-up gang” appearing to circle around for another run at them) is the emphasis on how this reinvention is a return to Intiman’s core identity and roots.

The announcement makes reference to Intiman’s history of “staging innovative work and attracting a loyal following of patrons committed to exploring contemporary topics through the lens of epic stories”–“contemporary” and “epic” have to be precisely the wrong words. Simply put, Intiman was Seattle’s home for classic plays, with the space’s intimacy trumpeted in the very name.

That’s troubling because if there’s a tendency I’ve seen in this Board, it’s a willingness to believe their own spin even as it divorces itself from a reality apparent to everyone else. Break from a classics tradition if you’d like, just don’t claim that it’s not a break.

Russell told Berson that “one of the main things the board learned” from the crisis was the need to be “financially viable and artistically robust. We’d become a leaner and more nimble organization, more pay-as-you-go.”

That sounds good, but it is boilerplate that anyone on the Board could have produced for you before that last crisis–no one sets out to be artistically non-viable and artistically frail. What matters is actual practice. The group of people in charge of Intiman’s “financial viability” is the same group that oversaw the Intiman that spent itself out of existence. How they have developed a new concept of viability while being unable to divulge how Intiman reached outright closure is a mystery fit for the stage.

Arts & Entertainment, Music

Now Playing: Lee Ritenour & Dave Grusin at Jazz Alley

August 25, 2011 Guest Contributor

Special to The SunBreak by Rick Price.

With his first notes of “Harlequin” Wednesday night, guitarist Lee Ritenour had me wiping away tears. Ritenour and Dave Grusin are performing at Dimitriou’s Jazz Alley through August 28 (tickets: $28.50).

Good music hits you where you live, but be prepared: This show is an emotional ride. Ritenour invites you into a warm, intimate place, then blows your head off with high-energy funk.

At 59, Ritenour has been around: His first session work–for The Mamas and The Papas–was in 1968, when he was 16. His resume is one of the few places you’ll see “Pink Floyd” and “Frank Sinatra” on one list!

The rest of the band? Equally accomplished. If you don’t know Dave Grusin’s keyboard work from albums like Nightlines and Mountain Dance, you’ve likely heard his compositions in one of more than five dozen films, including Tootsie and On Golden Pond. On Bill Evans’ “Turn out the Stars” and “Waltz for Debbie”, he had me misting up again.

Bassist/singer Melvin Davis and drummer Dave Weckl are a fluid and powerful rhythm section. Ritenour and Davis elegantly handled the one glitch of the night, when Davis’s microphone was too quiet early in the set. In midsong, without breaking stride, they let the engineer know, and he fixed it.

The evening is fun, but also intense. Ritenour told us he’d played Bob Marley’s “Get Up, Stand Up” in Norway, right after terrorist attacks killed 77 people there, and the audience belted out the chorus as one. “Stand up for your rights!” moved him, moved us.

These guys have been playing for a long time, and they still enjoy it. If there were tears, there was also much laughter. These are masters at the top of their game, and they let us in on the fun!

The SunBreak

Monthly Archives: August 2011