Last night I had a chance to see Strike! – The Musical at The Burton Cummings Theatre here.
Disclaimer: I’m not a usually a big fan of musicals. Most professional musicals that I’ve seen (which probably amount to less than two dozen in my lifetime), are either simply treacly or trite and unconvincing. The music of musicals typically sounds like cats (pardon the reference) thrown in a bag. And the storylines usually remind me of children’s literature by failed writers. Further, musicals, to me, falsely try to equate emotional musical content with disconnected fictive worlds. They fall flat because they try to heighten the senses while hiding their subject matter.
Not so with Strike! I went into the performance, as I always try to do, open minded and excited to see what composer Danny Schur has been working feverishly to accomplish. Strike!, in my mind, succeeds because it’s a fundamentally moving story of a fictive group of people in 1919 who accidentally and unintentionally changed the way things work in the world. These people, despite the sheer diversity of their backgrounds and experiences and beliefs, sing their way to a kind of freedom.
As my wife said last night, the people portrayed in the performance worked 60 hour weeks, six days a week and made next to nothing doing it. The delight in the actors’ voices, the solemnity of the characters’ desires, and the lovely and lovingly written score combined to make a powerful statement about being alive and being free.
All posts by Andrew Boardman
Jennifer Michael Hecht.
I listened to Jennifer Michael Hecht today (on WNYC.org (you’ll need the Real player to listen)) speak about life, love, and the universe and I was immediately taken. Her new book, The Happiness Myth, appears to fully attempt to debunk the tropes upon which we base most of our lives in the West. On the show, she essentially collapsed the difference between opium and Prozac, explaining that these two drugs are different sides of the same coin. Prozac, however, allows us to drive our cars and be productive citizens while being happy. She also talked about the relatonship between faith and certainty, doubt and discovery, and lefty culture.
I enjoyed listening to her: her New Yorkish accent, her overeducated brand of commentary, her youngish sense of possibility (and within that, a sharp capacity for critique and reason), and her aptitude for telling it straight. Ms. Hecht seems like someone I should have known when I lived in Brooklyn; she could have saved me from many of my consumerist and theoretical yearnings. I’ll read her book instead. Books are the last resort of the rascal.
This Canada.
Back to The North, a category on this blog that I’ve ignored for a few weeks.
It’s hard to believe that I’ve now lived in Canada for a year and a half. I’m slightly incredulous because I’m still geographically disenfranchised, my family is back East, and I’m unable to articulate the phrase “eh,” despite my best attempts. More interestingly, I’ve come to the mild conclusion that Canada embodies, in some ways, a better, more holistic vision of Western culture and capitalism than the United States. More to the point, I now think Canada is the relatively happy step-sister to the United States, which is riddled with Ritalin, war, and religion. By no means is life in Canada utopian (as many of my left-leaning friends in the States would like to think), but, in speaking with people here, I’ve learned that, while American complaints and anxieties are real and very massive, Canadian counterparts are real and more minor.
I probably need to give an example, and a personal one would be best. Living in New York, even before 9/11, I was constantly worried about random gun violence, trains falling off the track, car accidents, nuclear terrorism, environmental degradation, and potential loss of healthcare. Don’t get me wrong; living in New York for 11 years was phenomenal in every sense of the word. I wouldn’t have given it up for anything. But there wasn’t a day that went by in which one of these worries didn’t enter my consciousness and some days, sadly, all of them would coalesce to battle out a win for keeping me up at night. I sought help and got it and there’s no doubt that my own internal and wired neuroses traveled on the same airplane to Canada as I did.
However, the rapidity of these worries, while still extant, is much less pronounced. I’ll occasionally get a tinge of anxiety about personal income, terrorism, financial collapse, poor road conditions, or some other lovely thing but the intensity just isn’t there. I can only attribute this, in some part, to environmental effects. Canada, or the place I live in Canada, has modified my complaints. Weakend them, in fact.
Tom Hank's Typewriter.
I read today that Tom Hanks does not like or does not use computers. He prefers the , that great-great-great grandfather of our lowly keyboards. I don’t know why he prefers the typewriter, nor do I care. I vastly prefer being able to have a lightweight keyboard and screen on my lap or on my desk; the integrity of the writing process is better maintained, for me.
But I had a realization: I belong to the last generation that actively used a typewriter for writing. I think I’m it. Anyone a little bit younger than me would have learned to type on a TRS-80 or slightly newer computational device. I learned to type on keys, having to push hard on the letter “s” with my adolescently weak ring finger while getting that little thrill of throwing the carriage back, from the right to the left side.
Minisodes.
I read today in the Times that Sony, sometime next month, will introduce something called Minisodes. These little 3 to 6 minute television shows will consolidate older, out-of-play dramas such as Charlie’s Angels and T.J. Hooker. I quite like the idea.
Afterall, though I’d like to wax nostalgic in front of The Bionic Woman or The Love Boat or Love, American Style, thinking back to my pre-pubescent thoughts, it’s more likely that I would take a gander at a five-minute, heavily edited, perhaps slightly kitchified version of it on my computer screen. Reduce, reuse, recycle.
Design vs. Art.
I’ve been trying to explain the difference between these two things (design and art) for, oh, about 20 years, but Joshua Porter does it way better and more simply than anyone else I’ve seen. The differences are perhaps not as stark as Porter desires but his point, that design is about usability and art is about expression (political, social, psychic), rings.
In case you’re skeptical, here’s the firstmost of his Five Principles to Design By (and I really recommend reading the rest):
Technology Serves Humans.
Too often people blame themselves for the shortcomings of technology. When their computer crashes, they say “I must have done something dumb”. If a web site is poorly designed, they say “I must be stupid. I can’t find it”. They might even turn to a book for Dummies to get it right.
This is horrible! People should never feel like a failure when using technology. Like the customer, the user is always right. If software crashes, it is the software designer’s fault. If someone can’t find something on a web site, it is the web designer’s fault. This doesn’t mean that the designer has to hang their head in shame…they should see this as a learning opportunity! The big difference between good and bad designers is how they handle people struggling with their design.
Technology serves humans. Humans do not serve technology.
Yeltsin.
I was speaking with a client today and talking about blogs. I was explaining to her that smaller blogs today tend to cover less globally-relevant information while the mass-media continues to cover mass-relevant news, “like Boris Yeltsin.”
I don’t know why I mentioned even Yeltsin to her. It came out of nowhere. I hadn’t listened to the news all day. (I’m on a morning news fast.) I’m neither a huge fan of his nor do I think about him regularly. I sure hope I wasn’t the cause of it all.
New MANOVERBOARD.
It only took over a year of (part-time) work, but I’m thrilled to announce that MANOVERBOARD is redesigned, revised, and renewed.
It was a huge ordeal because designing for oneself is a bit like being a psychoanalyst trying to gain insight into one’s own parents’ dysfunctions. I spent hours and hours anxiously thinking about what kind of company I wanted to project, what kind of voice the content should produce, and which clients to feature and how. Because the site has to appeal in equal parts me and the universe of potential clients, I sweated and squirmed my way through nearly every stage of the design and the content development. I spent a few mornings at various non-wireless coffee shops, getting away from email and folders full of projects, so that I could write simply and simply write. I came up with at least six potential designs for the new site. Some of them sucked a lot. Others were so good that I almost ended up using them, though I’m thankful I did not.
The resulting website forced me to really think through some of my core beliefs about design. They are as follows:
- Create a beautiful container. I learned this when I designed the Barneys New York site a few years ago. There was no need for me to emphasize the decorative, the typographic, the obscure, the bizarre, or the visual form. I knew that Barneys would consistently present beautiful, unusual, and striking product and editorial imagery. My job was to create a gorgeous frame that could showcase the company’s photography and then get the hell out of the way.
- It’s not about you/me. Too often, designers work hard to over-represent themselves and their cleverness in their designs for clients. Some clients might appreciate this but I suspect those that do will probably fail. A designers’ responsibility is to present his or her clients’ work in the best of many possible lights. If, coincidentally, the designer gains kudos for their work, that’s nice. But the focus of the design should always be the client—and their customers.
- Everyone is equal. I’m a huge fan of Web accessibility and I feel it’s my responsibility as an educated designer to make sure that most of my clients’ content is accessible to most people. I know I can’t always do this, despite my best attempts. But keeping accessibility in mind in designing sites makes me feel that I, in a small way, am contributing to the democraticization of information online.
- Make it easy. Too many websites, even today, ten years after the commercial Web’s birth and growth, are hard to use. It’s sad, really. Bad technical practices, lack of foresight, and plain old laziness on the part of designers and developers make the Web a sometimes overly complicated experience for the average Joe. When designing, I always try to get in the head of a potential visitor to a site; I know I don’t always succeed but I have a brilliant colleague that can set me straight when I stray from the path. Making it easy for visitors means, to me, making potential visitors’ lives just a little bit easier.
Extra special thanks to Michael Barrish for helping with every phase of the site’s design and development, including producing the stellar CSS code and markup.
Strike.
My friend Danny Schur, an award-winning musician and playright, is rapidly preparing for the next stage of his Strike – The Musical about the Winnipeg General Strike and the riots and deportations that took place here in May of 1919. (A CBC Radio Concert Special will be recorded on May 15th, the 88th anniversary of the event.) The music is, well, striking—and powerful. O’Reilly’s Song is shown below.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PmRGG3qrAWI]
Grinderman.
I got the new Grinderman (aka Nick Cave and a new band) and it’s good, but also sad.
I saw Nick Cave in concert in Providence, RI, around 1988, and then again in Boston a few months later. He was incredible then. Just fresh off the Your Funeral, My Trial trail and with a band that included the inimitable Blixa Bargeld on guitar and the brilliant Mick Harvey, the shows were positively electric. Lights blinked on and off, red and yellow and white, pounding drums. Nick Cave commanded the fucking stage, his slicked back hair and lit cigarette flying everwhere. Girls were going mad at these concerts for him and the guys I knew would just die to be him, even for a day. He built his entire character on the backs of Johnny Cash, Leonard Cohen, William Blake, James Dean and a hundred other romantics, Nick Cave in his thin, black suits and ties just rocked.
Can you tell that I adored him and the Bad Seeds? I did. He told the dirty truth about a dirty world and a dirty mind and, for someone with a poetically romantic bent, Nick Cave bent sinister.
I lived in London in 1990 and I, somehow, got tickets to see him there. That was a truly remarkable concert, part of his The Good Son tour.
Now, with Grinderman, Cave looks old. His eyes are sunken, his hair is thin, his wrinkles are pronounced. He looks like hell – the tobacco and drugs and drink evidently haven taken their toll. And the new songs are desparate, dispairing, grotesque even. One song, “No Pussy Blues,” is particularly impactful. There’s a bad interview with Cave in Salon that’s worth reading, if, for nothing else, getting a sense of where the guy is at, currently (but don’t listen to the young, naive interviewer make a fool of himself in front of Cave on the podcast). Here’s an excerpt:
Look, when I’m alone and writing there are all sorts of influences — feminine and masculine influences, memories and ghosts of the past, all that stuff — having an impact on what I write. With Grinderman, most of it, I’m stuck in a room with four guys in the middle of a fucking monumental midlife crisis. It’s a male thing. It’s an old man kind of thing. I think there’s really something kind of hysterical in the music that’s a reflection of that.
Look, Nick Cave is old. He’s the musical acknowledgement of our age.
Postscript. Found on YouTube:
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vzObz-RDEM4]