Jeremy M. Barker
About Jeremy M. Barker:
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| Jeremy M. Barker was born and raised in Portland, Oregon, prior to decamping to Eugene, Oregon for a college education in theatre and comparative literature. After moving to Seattle in 2003, he worked in the theatre, freelanced, covered local issues and arts, and worked a variety of jobs ranging from shipping clerk to evil corporate businessman. In 2010, he relocated to New York City, where he currently lives in Brooklyn and serves as the editor of Culturebot.org, a website devoted to covering contemporary dance, theatre, and performance in a global context. | |
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The way your date last night began...and ended. (From TheQ! in the Flicka pool [Yes, we have pretty black horses...].)
I get a lot of invitations via Facebook. That doesn't make me cool. It's just part and parcel with doing what I do, which is writing about performing arts. I use Facebook to follow a lot of companies, and I'm "friends" with a lot of artists all over the place, which means that I get added to their invites. For instance, a while back, as I recall, a Romanian-American choreographer named Cosmin Manolescu invited me a dance festival in, I think, Ljubljana. I remember this because I looked it up, idly thinking "wouldn't it be cool if I could actually go," before politely marking "no" on the invite.
Generally speaking, I only even check my invites when the little count in the upper right of Facebook hits around 20, which usually takes about five days. Then I go through and check who invited me. I guess I have a decent memory, because four out of five times this means I know where the event is probably taking place (is it is someone in Seattle, New York, or somewhere else?).
If not, I check a little deeper. Events I am already going to I mark "yes," events I might go to or that I want to remember for a practical reason, I mark "maybe." The "maybe" category I use, among other things, to keep track of what's going on in Seattle so I can try to preview shows. Facebook is good for this sort of thing. I'm not fancy enough a writer--nor are all artists organized enough--to ensure that I get press releases for everything. So I use Facebook to be proactive.
Anyway, I guess this means I'm using Facebook wrong, or not proactively enough. I'm being too passive (despite being a Facebook addict), because I really could be missing something important. For instance, if I was Egyptian, I could have missed the invite to the revolution. Shame on me!
Normally here at TSB we stick to things that are very Seattle-centric, but since I'm an editor here I'm going to bend the rules a bit and venture further afoot: in this case, into the weird, self-absorbed world of media (and social media in particular), and the weird way we let these tendencies shape our perceptions of the world. The reason? I've been reading about the "Facebook Revolution" in Egypt, and it's actually getting annoying.
The background is really this: back in October, The New Yorker's Malcolm Gladwell, a writer who's made an astounding career repackaging other people's research into digestible nuggets of counter-intuitive wisdom, wrote a much commented on story arguing that social networks create a certain sort of weak or "soft" network, which is good at doing something a weak network would be good at it. Someone steal your cell phone? Send your number to all your Facebook friends to have them call it and irritate the thief who's using it, until you finish disconnecting the service. That sort of thing.
This Gladwell contrasts with what he clearly intends to be more meaningful sorts of networks. Strong networks, forged in the real world. He begins with the story of the four black college students who, in 1960, protested segregation by sitting down and demanding to be served in the whites' section of the Woolworth's lunch counter in Greensboro, N.C. It was one of the defining moments of the Civil Rights Movement. This level of commitment and risk, Gladwell argues, could never have come about through soft social networks.
Fast forward four months and Gladwell is taking his lumps from every direction. See, the American media has dubbed the recent actions in Egypt, which led to the ouster of Hosni Mubarak and the end of his thirty-year dictatorship, a triumph of social media technology. Gladwell himself stepped in a few days before Mubarak was ushered from power in a military coup on The New Yorker's website, arguing that he was right all along, in a story provocatively titled, "Does Egypt Need Twitter?" (Answer per Gladwell: No.)
I first caught wind of the anti-Gladwell backlash when Paul Constant over at the Slog went after Gladwell in what struck more than a few readers as a potentially homophobic--or at least sexist--critique, after declaring, "Malcolm Gladwell is wrong." Now the issue is all over the blogosphere. Some people think Gladwell's right, some people think he's wrong. (If you want to exhaustively read up on what everyone else things, just Google it.) Here's what I think.
My first response is--and here I might be channeling The Stranger's own Charles Mudede, I don't know if he's brought this up yet, but if not he should--that it's an amazingly Western-centric view of what's happening in Egypt. I mean, thank God we've found a way to make their amazing acts of courage about us. Stupid, benighted, medieval Muslims! Thank God American capitalism existed so that an oddly Chauncey Gardner-esque social misfit from Harvard (seriously, read The New Yorker's profile--Zuckerberg is shockingly not there; the story of how he was surprised that a gay man might not want to come out to his family via Facebook is priceless and the sine qua non of our era) could create a time-sucking river of links, videos, and status updates from which Egyptians only apparently recently learned that their president was a corrupt dictator, surrounded by a kleptocracy that was impoverishing the nation and stealing the future from the youth. I mean, it may not be the liberation of Buchenwald, but at least we're still there.
Really, far from "mincing and pouting," Gladwell was being completely straightforward and correct when he pointed out:
People protested and brought down governments before Facebook was invented. They did it before the Internet came along. Barely anyone in East Germany in the nineteen-eighties had a phone—and they ended up with hundreds of thousands of people in central Leipzig and brought down a regime that we all thought would last another hundred years—and in the French Revolution the crowd in the streets spoke to one another with that strange, today largely unknown instrument known as the human voice. People with a grievance will always find ways to communicate with each other. How they choose to do it is less interesting, in the end, than why they were driven to do it in the first place.
And he's definitely correct at the beginning when he writes:
We now believe that the “how” of a communicative act is of huge importance. We would say that Mao posted that power comes from the barrel of a gun on his Facebook page, or we would say that he blogged about gun barrels on Tumblr—and eventually, as the apostles of new media wrestled with the implications of his comments, the verb would come to completely overcome the noun, the part about the gun would be forgotten...
And here's the real kicker--I don't like Malcolm Gladwell very much. It's not always that I think he's wrong. Sometimes he has very good points. They're just not his (and to be fair, he cites whose they are). Gladwell specializes in a sort of Popular Mechanics for academic research, repackaging sometimes years--even decades--of academic study into a social critique that exists primarily to posit that solid evidence suggests prevailing wisdom is wrong. He's like Thomas Friedman, another writer who's made a career of never having a genuine insight of his own, except that, unlike Friedman, Gladwell actually does research beyond fanboying whatever hip new thing he just came across.
But Gladwell's take on social networking and its relationship to active social change actually seemed somewhat novel, and I respected him making the point. Go figure that this is the piece that everyone wants to tar and feather him for. Because he was right then, and he's still right now.
This is the point I was making at the beginning. There's a difference between the dissemination of information--which Facebook and other social media certainly facilitated in this case--and bringing hundreds of thousands of people together for a peaceful revolution. People who needed to know where to go and when to get there relied on the Facebook invite, but by that point they'd already checked "yes." And they meant it. I sincerely doubt that simply receiving the invite was what got them to show up for the revolution. That was something different for everybody, and--this might also be a shock for many Americans--probably not so instantaneous. The revolution wasn't a flash mob. It didn't appear out of thin air, as an article in The New York Times--which ironically purports to further the social media revolution meme--makes clear.
Quite the opposite of a completely spontaneously revolt, it turns out that the youthful activists we heard so much about, who helped organize the protests in Tahrir Square, spent years preparing. They started in 2005. They studied the work of American social activists. They traveled to Serbia to workshop with the leaders of the youth movement that overthrew ethno-fascist Slobodan Milosevic. The coordinated with existing groups, including unions, and staged several protests that were brutally suppressed before finally coordinating what happened in the last few weeks. And over the last six years, members were arrested and tortured on several occasions--continually facing threats to life and well-being for six years--yet persisted until the beginning of the amazing last few weeks, which was tied to an existing day of political commemoration dating back to colonial era atrocities. Oh, and when Mubarak's goons descended on them, who organized the defense? The Muslim Brotherhood--an eighty-year-old network that persisted despite consistent government suppression, and soccer fans with a history of collectively screwing with the police. Hard networks, in other words. Just like Gladwell talked about.
But here's the other thing, the reason I find myself so irritated by the prevailing narrative, and I guess this is how this comes back to me being an arts writer. I may not be an expert on international politics, or the tactics of social revolution, but I do spend a lot of time dealing with stories. People like stories; culture itself is the set of stories that explain how a society gets from one point to another through time. And stories tell us a lot about the people who tell them. This case is no different.
One of the things I've noticed about we Americans is that we love stories about the strength of individuals, because we love the thought that anyone can do anything. We tell our children that they can grow up to be the president or an astronaut or a billionaire tech mogul or whatever really cool and amazing thing they want to be. And we believe it, even though the vast majority of us will never do anything so amazing. Indeed, many of us will wind up working awful, dead-end jobs at ruthless corporations that undervalue our contributions and destroy our communities through low pay and low benefits. In fact, part of the reason Wal-Mart and McDonald's and so many other service sector jobs are so awful is precisely because we tend to think we can do better, rather than the more reasonable proposition than what we actually have to do shouldn't be so awful. Hence the moral opposition to estate taxes the vast majority of opponents would never have to pay (and which more than a few "victims" of support).
We love our Horatio Alger stories, in other words, and we constantly tell ourselves stories about the amazing, heroic things we (well, not most of us, but someone who's just like us) do. In war films, and little-guy taking on the world movies. We love both movies in which down-home people from the Midwest go to New York and ascend the social ladder through pluck and wits alone, as well as films in which those same sorts of people--now recast as snobs--go to the Midwest and discover how fulfilling small town values are, and choose a small, meaningful life of hard work and an honest paycheck over glamour and money.
Of course, no matter which way the person's moving through society, it requires a democratizing principal to identify with them. This is the other part of it. We're all equally potentially capable of being uniquely amazing, but God help you if you want to be better than anyone else. Holly Golightly is a skank willing to trade her considerable...er, endowments for money, who can only be saved by a gigolo with a heart of gold who convinces her of the value of true love (a cinematic departure from Truman Capote's novella). As Thomas Fairchild puts it in Sabrina, "The papers would have said how fine and democratic for a Larrabee to marry the chauffeur's daughter. But would they praise the chauffeur's daughter? No." Unless, of course, she was, say, bringing down-home Texan sass to Washington, DC.
We tell stories about a democratic society, in other words, in which people can be whatever they choose, assuming it's the right choice, and we invite ourselves to imagine doing so far more consistently in our stories than we allow ourselves to do wrong or cowardly or--God forbid--morally unclear acts. Sophie's Choice isn't an American story.
My personal favorite example of this comes from Saving Private Ryan. In the final battle scene, one of the characters--always squirrely and jumpy and unreliable--watches a Nazi soldier kill one of his comrades. It's the scene where the Nazi slowly pushes the knife while reciting a prayer in German. The dynamic of the scene is impossible to miss. The audience is shocked and outraged and disgusted by the cowardice of this guy, because, of course, we'd all like to imagine having the courage to save our friend if we were in his place.
Ironically, during World War II, a fair number more of us would have been doing the same thing as the "coward" as today. In the 1995 book On Killing, Dave Grossman, a former Army Ranger and professor of psychology at West Point, tracks the development of soldier training from World War II, during which only 15 to 20 percent of American troops were prepared to fire their rifle to kill another human being, to Vietnam, when the military had dramatically increased that figure to 90 percent of soldiers. And anyone whose grandfather was a WWII vet and whose father a Vietnam vet can probably speak to the personal cost of that increased efficiency.
But the identification is still understandable. No one wants to think they'd let their friend be killed in front of them without acting. Most people, being essentially decent, imagine they'd help Anne Frank's family or stand in front of the tank at Tianenmen Square. Unfortunately, though, very few of us are like that. The GI at My Lai who turned his guns on his own comrades to protect innocent children is the rarity; most of us, as infamous experiments like Milgram and Grossman's account of the ruthless effectiveness of military training teach us, basically do whatever we're told, and would busily be committing an atrocity.
But that doesn't stop us from imagining our own endless capacity for doing whatever the right and courageous thing is. Hence the appeal of a Facebook Revolution. It's a story that appeals directly to our own sense that we can do something amazing, and that, in fact, we already are through virtually no further effort on our part. It can't happen here! If someone tries, why, we'll all know on Facebook and immediately stand up to it! The news feed answers the question, who's guarding the guardians? Well, of course, we are.
Time magazine had it dead on a couple years ago with its reflecty cover making us all the Person of the Year. Our democratic principles of course make us scoff at the notion that anything we do is that important, and we write it off as pandering on the part of the dead-trees MSM. But of course, we would do something that important if it came to it...just so long as we saw the invite in time to show up.
As the magazine frequently points out, being Person of the Year isn't necessarily a good thing.
In short, the Facebook Revolution a story that appeals directly to what we, as Americans, want to think of ourselves, not who we actually are. (And I realize that this something essentially human as well, but Americans have a special hold on it. A German, say, has less room to claim that, in fact, it can't happen there.) And it bothers me for a couple of reasons. One, it's coming at the expense of the small group of dedicated activists who risked their lives over a period of years to--hopefully--help deliver their society from the clutches of a brutal dictator into a better future. And two, the idea that social media empowers us all to automatically ensure things never get too bad seems like a fancy way of praising ourselves for doing nothing.
One of the most high-minded social networking driven protests domestically in recent months was the "It Gets Better Campaign," founded by Dan Savage in response to the rash of bullying-induced suicides of gay youths. Briefly, a harsh spotlight was put on things like school anti-bullying policies, many of which explicitly excluded discussions of bullying for sexual orientation as a sop to the anti-gay right. (I don't like to read too much between the lines, but it sure as hell seems like that defines bullying gays as...not actually bullying.)
Did the incredibly popular and widely embraced campaign succeed in changing many of these? You'd be hard pressed to tell, since most follow-up reporting disappeared along with the rash of gay suicides (not that bullying, and the terrible cost of it, is gone--just our collective attention is elsewhere). For all its good intentions, It Gets Better is pretty indicative of a soft social network that has not exactly led to an eruption of protest at America's anti-gay laws. In fact, the issue of gay rights is off the political radar now that DADT was repealed, creating the disgusting hypocrisy that gays can now openly serve and die for a country that legislates that they're second-class citizens.
In short, the idea that doing nothing more than engaging via social networks can change the work is appealing--it flatters everything we want to think about ourselves, while at the same time indulging our worst tendencies towards inaction. The examples of Ahmed Maher and his colleagues in Kefaya should inspire us to act, just as David Richmond, Franklin McCain, Ezell Blair, and Joseph McNeil did in the courageous action at the Woolworth lunch counter in 1960--and remind us of the hard work, occasional risk, and sacrifice required to change the world and make it a better place, rather than accepting stories that tell us we're already doing everything we should to build a better tomorrow.
JMB [Arts writer.]: Happy Vday, y'all!
KP [Environmental policy analyst.]: Oh, MBV! Superawesome show! You and your clear Valentine's joy...
JMB: Sexy post-coital slow jam from MBV, come on!
KP: You and your post-coital cigarettes... Some things never change.
[...]
HAH! That came off lewder than expected! I meant in the sense of your mentioning and writing using them!
JMB: Okay, if no one likes my My Bloody Valentine Vday sexy, how about a classic?
KP: By-proxy V-Day video competition!!
JMB: Or, for those who find the entire exercise mystifying/terrifying/incomprehensible, let Bjork explain it to you.
MRN [Dancer/choreographer.]: [Submitted without comment.]
JMB: Heh. The Decemberists may be many things, but I don't they'll ever be sexy....
LP [Feminist critic.]: That song and that video, oh, they changed my teenage life. Back in the days when I stayed up late to watch 120 Minutes and Alternative Nation.
JMB: Yup. Now this is sexy.
KP: Raise, see, and call.
JMB: That's not really a ROMANTIC song though...
KP: Well no one said ROMANTIC per se.
(JMB and KP share the same following vid simultaneously.)
JMB: (Posting) "Should be clear I'm a cold, hard killer/
Who's sophisticated with touch of high-class/
A heart-breaker bringing death by sexy/...
A lady-killing mama in a rock n' roll band"
KP: (Posting) You know these boys are as ass-shakingly sexxy as they come!
KP: The most important thing I learned in grad school:
UPDATE: Artistic director Kate Whoriskey offers her thoughts on the Intiman's blog.
Well, Paul Mullin was right--on all counts!--as it turns out. This just in from the Intiman:
An open letter to the Seattle arts community
February 11, 2011
Dear friends,
I want to share some unsettling news about our beloved Intiman Theatre. As many of you know, we’ve been struggling for several months. Since the departure of our former Managing Director last fall, the board of trustees has unearthed a series of missteps and management failings. Inflated budget projections, unpaid bills and a complete lack of financial and accounting oversight have left the theater dangerously low on cash. Sadly, I must report that unless we are able to raise $500,000 by the end of March, an additional $250,000 by June, and $250,000 by September, we cannot continue. The $1 million dollar campaign is above and beyond the theatre’s 2011 annual fundraising goal.
Our staff and trustees have been tirelessly working to put our house in order – reconciling our books; establishing clear oversight; soliciting the support of independent leaders; paying down our debt; cutting operational costs; and reaching out to friends and family in the local community for help. The picture is now clearer and so is the harsh reality of the current situation.
I find this most difficult because the staff and creative leadership are incredibly strong right now and the quality of work being produced on our stage is of the highest quality and thematically touches on topics that need a public stage.
Seattle is a unique community; we are intellectually curious; progressively open minded; and willing to openly reflect and debate who we are as a community. I’m continually reminded by friends from the national theater community that only a city like Seattle could create a theater like Intiman. I also believe that only a city like Seattle can help preserve a gem like Intiman.
For 39 years Intiman has served as our community’s kitchen table for discussing relevant topics through art. We need your help to make sure that tradition continues. Please make a donation today by visiting www.intiman.org. At the website you will find more information on the current situation along with video testimonials from our artistic director, Kate Whoriskey, and acting managing director Melaine Bennett. You will also be able to show your direct support by making a donation.
Thank you for your time and continued support in helping Seattle maintain its reputation as progressive/trend-setting hotbed for the performing arts. Theaters like Intiman are critical to protecting that fragile ecosystem. Please help us protect this local treasure by making a donation to the theater today.
Sincerely,
Kim Anderson
President
Intiman Theatre, Board of Trustees
More details after the break:
INTIMAN FACT SHEET
What Happened?
● The former Managing Director resigned on November 1, 2010. Personal reasons were cited.
● Significant financial problems were uncovered at this time, putting the theatre into crisis mode. These include:
○ Misrepresentation and nondisclosure of the theatre’s financial stability and related financial issues to the Board and the various committees responsible for financial oversight of the theatre.
○ Unauthorized transfers by the Managing Director of restricted funds in the Foundation to the theatre’s operating account. Neither the Board nor Foundation Board approved the transfers.
○ Failure to meet best-practice standards in the finance office: severe inaccuracies and months-long backlog of bookkeeping, cash-flow attention, staffing capabilities and general reconciliation and accounting.
○ Mismanagement of and misrepresentation of financial impact of negotiations with co-producing entities.
○ Mismanagement of verbal pledge agreements from two key donors, resulting in a loss of revenue in the FY2010A budget.
What Immediate Actions Were Taken?
● Replaced Managing Director and Finance Director
○ Promoted Melaine Bennett, then Director of Development, to Acting Managing Director.
○ Engaged professional consultation from Dean Barney, CFO and respected arts finance manager.
○ Hired Interim CFO, Barbara Anderson, who has just completed a first draft of the financial statement for the FY10A and 10B
● From Nov. 1st through 2/4/2011, raised $874,315.
○ This number includes all CASH in; gifts, pledge payments, corporate, foundation government, etc. It does not include pledges.
○ Of that $874,315, $348,598 was from the Board.
● Created a rent repayment plan to bring Intiman current with Seattle Center.
● Repaired relationships with unions after discovering there were lapsed payments.
● Caught up on taxes.
● Identified past payables and created plans for repayment installments for the majority of accounts; plans are continuing to be developed with all vendors.
● Created a cash plan to get into 2011.
● Created a budget for 2011 that cuts over $1.4million (25%) from the previous 12-month budget.
● Commenced a 21-month audit to complete the financial picture for the 2009 and 2010 Seasons. Intiman changed its fiscal year calendar in 2010: previously ending March 31 and now ending December 31.
● Produced The Scarlet Letter and co-produced Black Nativity with STG, completing the 2010 Season.
What Further Actions Continue?
· Creating a fundraising initiative that will allow Intiman to operate in best-practice operations, create excellent theatre, engage the community, be a gathering place for ideas and art - AND go into the 40th Anniversary in 2012 debt-free. The campaign requires raising $500,000 by the end of March, an additional $250,000 by June, and $250,000 by September.
This is above and beyond the theatre’s 2011 annual fundraising goal.
● Establishing new Task Forces from the Board to continually monitor fundraising, past payables, vendor communication and the budget.
● Increasing board involvement in all areas of oversight for the various departments, especially in the areas of finance, accounting and budget tracking.
● Creating benchmarks for fundraising goals in the extraordinary giving campaign for 2011.
● Reducing staff to a 4-day week and working within the current budget to produce the 2011 plays.
● Reinstating checks and balances systems from the Board down to hourly staff who handle money.
● Documenting all practices and procedures.
● Identifying new CFO (in progress).
● Cultivating new Board membership (including one candidate who has an auditing background).
One of the hardest, if not the hardest, things this author has ever had to do is put a beloved pet to sleep. This morning, Glimpses will slightly bum you all out with this lovely photographic tribute by Great Beyond (in our Flickr pool) to his family's cat Shadow, whose nearly 20-year sojourn with the fam recently came to an end. Tony Case eulogizes on the Flickr page, which you can read by clicking through. RIP.
AmyO/tinyrage's The Lowdown at the Moore Theatre (Friday, Feb. 11; tickets $24). Choreographer Amy O'Neal takes it to the next level with The Lowdow: An Unexpected Night of Seattle Dance
Stone Dance Collective, this weekend at ChopShop.
ChopShop Dance Festival at the Meydenbauer Theatre (Sat. & Sun., Feb 12 & 13; tickets $25/$20). Choreographer Eva Stone's--of Stone Dance Collective--Chop Shop is the East Side's biggest contemporary dance festival, and entering it's fourth year, it's bigger and better than ever. Not only did it expand with a north-end satellite edition this year, but it features a remarkable line-up of performers, including Michael Rioux, Zoe Scofield, Catherine Cabeen, and mainstays Spectrum Dance, in addition to Stone's own company. The mission of Chop Shop, as Stone explained in an interview with TSB last year, is to help break down the intimidation of contemporary dance and encourage audiences to take a risk and engage. To that end, it features master classes with some of the artists as well as a series of Reading Dance lectures which went down in January.
Ten Tiny Dances at Velocity Dance Center (Fri.-Sun., Feb, 11-13; tickets $18/$16). Starting in Portland almost ten years ago, Ten Tiny Dances is a gem and small fixture of Northwest dance. Produced in Seattle by Crispin Spaeth, the show challenges dancers to present on (and, to be fair, around) a four-foot-by-four-foot stage. I caught part of the Portland edition at PICA's TBA Festival back in September, and while the atmosphere was more party than serious dance, it was still a hell of a time. The Seattle edition at Velocity features work by Donald Byrd, Dayna Hanson, Salt Horse, SANDSTROMMOVEMENT, and DAE's Haruko Nishimura, among others.
Odds & Ends: It's a big closing weekend for plays: Boom! Theater's A Net is closing at their theater (tickets $15/$10); Eclectic Theatre's The Misanthrope at Odd Duck (tickets $20/$25/$10); and David Mamet's November at New City Theatre (tickets $15).
