Hive Times

Surviving the whims of the many

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The New York Times on Friday posted an eye-opening review of a new book by the famed Silicon Valley prophesier Jaron Lanier, an early champion of Internet populism who now seems to have reconsidered his love for the ever-intractable Web. Lanier’s book, You Are Not a Gadget, condemns Web 2.0 culture for trampling intellectual property, diminishing the importance of uniqueness, and fostering the digital equivalent of mob rule. To prove his theory, the author cites some of my favorite guilty pleasures—Google, Facebook, Wikipedia—as insidious forces bent on stripping us of our individual voices.

I haven’t yet read Lanier’s book, but the Times review alone has stirred my longstanding ambivalence toward the Age of Ones and Zeros. I’ve always met this brave new world with resistance, adapting to new technology with one hand while pinching my nose with the other. As a generation on the cusp of old media and new, I’ve watched about half of my cohorts embrace blogs, Twitter, and social networks while the other half slowly vanished into an ink smudge of analog obsolescence. At the same time, I slowly, begrudgingly, adopted the use of these cute little tools with a snarky sigh of acceptance, all the while proclaiming myself a lover of the clearly superior forms of old media with which I grew up.

I could never explain quite why I opposed the new order, and over the years I’ve chalked it up to a glut of idiosyncrasies—fear of the unknown, cultural myopia, Gen-X skepticism, plain old curmudgeonliness, or what have you—but my unease was always fueled by one particularly haunting thought: a world in which everyone has a say in everything.

On the surface, opposing such a world seems so bigoted. After all, why shouldn’t we all have a say in things? That’s fair, right? Yet the concept so rarely works in practical application that the wigged gentlemen who framed our Constitution even added a set of checks and balances to prevent it, hence the Bill of Rights, which protects the individual from mob rule. In other words, if enough people hated this blog post, they couldn’t simply “vote” to have me killed, as killing me would violate my civil right to, well, live. Individual civil rights trump the whims of the majority, and thank goodness for that, lest we would still live in a country of separate drinking fountains and an all-male Congress.

The Internet operates on the opposite principal, distorting the playing field so that the individual is lost under the illusion of democracy. On YouTube, for instance, a view is a view, and because videos of 17-year-old girls dancing around in their underwear will never fail to attract a certain sizable subset of the population, such videos may garner a higher ranking than a national address by President Obama. Does that make them more valuable to society? (Okay, depends on whom you ask.)

Meanwhile, as browser software has evolved to meet the growing interactivity of Web surfing, the former domain of sound opinion has become a breeding ground for unchecked schmuckdom. A review by the veteran New York Times critic A.O. Scott, for instance, is now saturated with flippant comments by readers, shielded by anonymity, who even get to rate the review from one to four stars—a kind of game of Critique the Critic. Not that the Times hasn’t always included editorials from everyday folk, but the new level of interactivity has one wondering when Pinch Sulzberger will decide to add a “like” button to stories about al Qaeda cells in Yemen.

The Internet isn’t going away (yes, I stopped wishing for that back in 1998), and putting the genie back in the bottle is about as practical as trying to convince people the world is flat. However, it’s worth pondering the questions about the future of our society that remain open ended: If everyone has a voice, does anyone? And if we truly are moving toward some Borg-like hive mind à la Star Trek: the Next Generation, is there anything we can do to mitigate its ill effects? Can we choose a life off the grid, or is resistance futile?

Andy Warhol once said, “In the future everyone will be famous for 15 minutes,” but what he failed to foresee was how the changing definition of fame would render the concept obsolete. Time magazine can slap a mirror on its cover and dub us all “Person of the Year” just as easily as we can publish our own scathing commentary about Time magazine’s irrelevance. Andy’s future is here, and we’re all as famous as we are anonymous.

Our Tough-Luck Theater Town

I wrote this article a few months ago in Show Business Weekly about the struggling nonprofit theater industry. It seemed apt in light of the story in Crain’s New York Business on Monday about the Roundabout Theatre Company’s serious financial woes.

It’s anyone’s guess where New York’s theater artists will be a year from now. Hell, try six months.

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Recession Clobbers Nonprofit Theaters
Dwindling funds to arts groups highlight disparity between commercial and non-commercial sectors

By Christopher Zara

At a time when fewer Americans can afford the extravagance of attending a Broadway show, one would expect a conference on the future of performing arts in New York City to be a gloomy affair. However, on the stately campus of Columbia University’s School of the Arts late last month, where hundreds of theater professionals and arts aficionados gathered for a four-hour symposium dubbed “Performing Arts at a Crossroads,” the mood was surprisingly peppy and optimistic.

The conference, part of the “Future of New York City” series presented by Crain’s New York Business, comprised a string of panel discussions with arts administrators and city officials who had hoped to open a dialogue about how New York’s arts industry can weather the country’s worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. The discussions were both lively and rallying — a hopeful token of the city’s position as a leading purveyor of arts and culture — but in the end few solutions were offered as to what, if anything, should be done to combat dwindling funds in the theater industry, particularly within its embattled nonprofit sector.

“The arts are a powerful driver of everything we do and are in New York,” First Deputy Mayor Patricia Harris reminded the crowd in her opening speech, touting Mayor Michael Bloomberg as an avid arts enthusiast who returned cultural initiatives to the top of the municipal agenda on his first day in office, January 1, 2002. Less than four months after 9/11, Harris said, Bloomberg immediately green-lit Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s The Gates installation in Central Park. “Faced with a looming deficit that out-paced a national recession, why would a mayor even think about public art?” Harris asked rhetorically. “It’s because he was counting on The Gates to do three things that the arts do every single day: transform the quality of life in New York, enhance our identity and, yes, contribute to the city’s economy.”

Eight years after the 9/11 attacks, New York City is facing a new economic menace, one that has forced even the most devoted theatergoers to tighten their entertainment budgets. To be sure, the dire effects of the recession have not battered the theater community equally across the board. At last month’s conference, one panel discussion focused specifically on the theater business. Although its aim was to find common solutions for theater companies both large and small, the discussion ultimately underscored the huge economic disparity that exists between commercial and nonprofit theater.

Nina Lannan, chairman of the Broadway League, a trade association for Broadway theaters, maintained a downright cheerful demeanor in the face of questions about how the recession has affected the Great White Way. Lannan, who also worked as general manger last year on the Broadway shows Billy Elliot, 9 to 5 and Mamma Mia!, said Broadway ticket sales are down only about 10 to 15 percent, far less than in other areas of the city. During the last week of September, for example, nine out of the 26 shows currently on Broadway played at a 90 percent capacity.

In short, while Broadway’s commercial sector had been expecting a sharp recession-related decline in ticket sales, anxiety over its bottom line has so far been unfounded. “We were all worried about the summer, but with many shows, we did proceeds over $1,000,000,” Lannan said. “And September has been pretty good for us, too.”

This is not to say that Broadway is immune to the recession. To illustrate this, Lannan cited the recent musical flop 9 to 5, which, despite being based on a popular movie, failed to find an audience and was forced to close on Labor Day weekend. “I think in this climate people are being more choosy about their shows,” she said.

For Todd Haimes, artistic director of the nonprofit Roundabout Theatre Company, the consequences of the recession have been far more devastating. Haimes was quick to acknowledge a drop in subscriptions and general attendance, but he said such declines have been minor in comparison to the falloff in corporate and private donations to the Roundabout. “Where we’re getting killed — and I think this is true to varying degrees for all nonprofits — is in contributions,” he said. “It was like falling off a cliff. We didn’t prepare for it at all.”

Haimes said that many of the major corporate foundations, which could be counted on in the past for huge donations to nonprofits, have been wiped out by the stock market. Moreover, he noted a general decline in corporate philanthropy that has taken place over the last two and a half decades. “When I came to New York in 1983, it was the responsibility of every corporation to give philanthropic dollars back to the community,” he said. “Over the years that shifted, which is sad. Now it’s become nothing.”

Panel moderator Steven Chaikelson, director of Columbia’s theater program, kept a necessary degree of optimism in response to Haimes’s bleak outlook on the future of nonprofit theater. Driving home the point that the arts industry is not a particularly stable one, even in times of economic growth, Chaikelson went so far as to balk at the conference’s ominous-sounding theme, “Performing Arts at a Crossroads,” which he admitted is a vague concept. “I read that title and scratched my head,” he said. “When have we not been at a crossroads? It seems like we’ve been facing the imminent demise of theater for the last 100 years.”

Average Community’s Jersey Homecoming

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I hope everyone in the Northeast will come to the New Jersey screening of the new documentary my brother and I produced. (I’m a little nervous about the Q&A). Press release below:

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Remember City Gardens? Remember New Jersey hardcore in the 1980s? Well, you’re not alone.

The Zara Brothers’ Trenton-set documentary, AVERAGE COMMUNITY, will have its official New Jersey premiere this month at the Record Collector in Bordentown. The gritty punk-rock docu-memoir, directed by Trenton native Fred Zara, took home the Audience Award for Best Feature Documentary at the 2009 CMJ Film Festival in October, where it played to an enthusiastic crowd at the Norwood Screening Room in New York’s West Village.

Fred and Christopher Zara will be on hand for a Q&A. Hosted by City Gardens’ own Randy Now.

Wednesday, December 30
The Record Collector
358 Farnsworth Ave.
Bordentown, NJ
www.the-record-collector.com

All tickets are $10
Advance tickets at the store (assigned seats)
and from www.the-record-collector.com
NO children under 13 please.

This Is Self-Loathing

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IT’S WHEN you think you’re too ugly
to appreciate beauty.

It’s when you have a dry mouth
but you haven’t been smoking weed.

It’s when being rude at the supermarket feels like bloody murder.

It’s when you can’t figure out why people hang out with you.

It’s when you think you’re shaped like a pear, or a pork chop,
or some unflattering dairy product.

It’s when you always take more than the recommended dose.

It’s when you think you deserve the disease.

It’s when you listen to the Violent Femmes because that one song reminds you of a lovely day in your girlfriend’s bedroom before your heart got all scabby.

It’s when you feel dirty after a shower.

It’s when you feel like a pervert after an orgasm.

It’s when the things that turn you on become the things you hate.

It’s when you shop at Ikea.

It’s when you break mirrors or can’t stop staring into them.

It’s when the tiniest flaw swallows your face.

It’s when you blame yourself for the aging process.

It’s when you can’t stop playing the conversation in your head.

It’s when you’re really quite normal.

Listerine Wants Me Dead

In September 2008, I wrote an unkind blog post in which I expressed my deep abhorrence of Listerine Antiseptic Mouthwash commercials. I explained how the enhanced sound of actors swooshing Listerine around in their mouths (courtesy of top-dollar Foley artists, no doubt) is akin to fingernails on a chalkboard. It is a rankling din, and to this day, I can’t understand why Listerine, which is owned by Johnson & Johnson, continues to advertise its product in such a categorically bothersome way. The worst kind of advertising is the kind that creates a negative association with the product, and in this case that disdainful feeling invariably carries over into the supermarket isle. My only intention with the post was to express my hope that Listerine would one day see the folly of its swooshing campaign and stop the commercials altogether.

However, while a handful of readers agreed fervently with me on the matter, the blog post didn’t attract much attention. In fact, it had been all but dormant, virtually unviewed for more than a year, and I eventually chalked the whole thing up to my own idiosyncratic neuroses. Then, at the beginning of this week, something happened. The Listerine post began to attract views, many of them, and they all appeared to be directed by a simple, single-word search term: Listerine.

Since it’s hard to imagine “Listerine” ranking among the world’s most popular search terms, I’ve determined that there can be only one explanation for this anomaly: Someone over at Johnson & Johnson has caught wind of my opinion. The company has clearly launched an internal investigation that will end with a plot to silence me by any means necessary. A $63 billion pharmaceutical company, one of the world’s largest suppliers of health-care products, wants me dead.

I won’t pretend I’m not afraid. However, there is a larger issue at stake here. These commercials, with their Listerine-swooshing actors, must stop, and I’m going on record with this statement just in case I end up dead in a ditch somewhere or floating in the East River. Johnson & Johnson is, after all, based in New Jersey. Granted, it’s in New Brunswick, a place where the scariest thing I’ve ever seen is a drunken Rutgers student singing REM’s “Shiny Happy People” at a karaoke bar, but there is no telling what this big-pharma giant is capable of, and what measures it will take to silence me. If the unthinkable happens, I want this post to propagate my martyrdom.

In a world of global warming, religious extremism, human sex trafficking, deepening economic instability, and Tiger Woods sex scandals, it’s not easy to determine which issues demand immediate attention. But even a single airing of a Listerine commercial is one airing too many. That said, I welcome you to come and get me, Johnson & Johnson. You can’t silence my cause any more than your product can prevent gingivitis.