I think I became aware of the Idol behemoth a couple of years back. I'd heard about it, of course, (how could you not?), but it really hadn't entered my consciousness until the very end of season 4. The ads began to seep into my head, and that damn, viral jingle found its way to the very tips of my vocal cords in a subconscious kind of way. But I did not tune in to a show until the audition portion of season 5. The rapture of those waved on to Hollywood was really appealing; however, what really got me was the looks on the faces of those who weren't chosen. And I don't mean those overblown losers, the angry ones with red faces and mirror-practiced grimaces and the chair throwing fits. I was taken with the losers who looked into the camera, gave a careful and guarded smile, and walked away. The quiet ones who didn't make a big external show but you knew were hurting inside. The long shot from behind of a young man walking into the arms of his girlfriend just put me away. There was something here, I said to myself. Something, dare I say, culturally meaningful. Maybe I'd jumped the gun judging this show so harshly and without requittal.
Anyway, after the auditions of Season 5, I found myself tuning in on Tuesday nights. At first it was to watch House, one of the best shows on television. Wonderful lead-in, Idol, to a show that deals death and vicodin and passive aggressive doctoring all in one cozy hour. Idol brings you up, plays with your dreams and your aspirations for celebrity, hangs you there to wait until Wednesday for the results show. But Tuesday nights became a kind of repast from the daily chaos of graduate school and, at first, was a real escape. I wasn't invested in the contestants, I told myself at first. But then the season wore on and my thoughts turned increasingly to considerations of the contestants. Katharine McPhee? Beautiful and talented, articulate and wholesome. Taylor Hicks? Also a wonderul soul singer, but a bit of a blowhard. Who did I want to win? Every time Ryan Seacrest paused while giving the results, with his card in hand and the artificial hush spread across the crowd, I was in suspense with everyone else. During the commercial breaks, I fell back into my chair, exhausted with the anxiety of expectation. But after the break, I was always back into the show, attentive to every moment, every flat performance, every intonation of the judges.
And now, with two weeks remaining in Season 6, I've watched nearly every episode, have very definite opinions about each contestant, and find myself a little flush with emotion when my favorites are voted off. Last night, when LaKisha left? Nothing but sadness for her. And part of it, at least for me, is that the Idol producers give the audience just enough personal information about each contestant--not enough to "know" the character of the contestant (because that's what they are, simply characters, enhanced by behind-the-scencsters), but just enough to keep you interested. It's pure and simple condiditioning--I know a few choice details about each contestant that makes me hungry for more. When I don't get any further information, I'm forced to take what I can, and that's the performances. So I'm invested in LaKisha, in her child and her job as a bank teller. But that's as far as the personal connection goes. Given to character development, I begin to love the on stage drama of her weekly decline that fails her earlier promise, not to mention the sub plot of the Simon-LaKisha kiss. Now that we're down to three, who is it? Blake is from the Northwest. I'm from the Northwest. I'm hooked.
What is it about Idol that grabs people? And by people I mean 37 million of us, every Tuesday night. And on television? In the age of the Internet, it's unheard of. Each season tops records set by the last.
To be continued...
Thursday, May 10, 2007
Monday, April 23, 2007
New Fiction
I've been thinking a lot lately about new fiction. The conversation was started at my writing group. One of the group brought in an essay she is preparing for a conference in Romania, of all places. The essay's thesis, so to speak, was this: Outlets for the short story have dramatically decreased to the point that a short story writer is unable to support oneself by writing short fiction alone. This brought about quite a discussion, and the consensus was that this is true, to a point. The financial part, certainly. Three of the members of our group are well-published and really fantastic writers, but they must supplement their income by teaching, freelancing, or working office jobs. They write, but must work other jobs to pay the bills. But the other side of this debate is that outlets for fiction have increased with the Internet and with the rapidly decreasing costs of self- and small press publishing. It seems that many small journals are "flourishing" around the country. (Quotes mean that these journals may be small, labor of love projects that aren't really financially viable, but are publishing great pieces.) The debate about fiction outlets begs the question: is the short story surviving? I think the answer is a resounding "yes." This is a time when many, many people are writing fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction (a kind of large, amorphous field that has yet to be defined) and other kinds of genres that also are difficult to categorize. With a cursory google search of literary journals, many pop up--and not simply self-indulgent journals run by a group of friends. Any MFA program worth its salt runs a literary magazine, and many journals have sprung up with only a web presence. Many publish quality stories by well-recognized authors as well as up and coming writers. At final glance, this is a good time for fiction writers.
Of course, it would be nice to make a living by simply writing short stories. But that day, if it ever existed, is over, and fiction writers have to be satisfied with publishing for fifty bucks and a year's subscription until they work their way up to the admittedly few national publications that pay well for stories.
Like any model, I think this model has its pros and cons. It's a kind of weeding out procedure, on the one hand. On the other, there's a lot of fiction out there published in the New Yorker or Harpers that just isn't that good. Why is it published? My sense is that nepotism plays a part in publishing, just as in any other industry. For those of us without connects, it's a matter of making a name for oneself in the small, well-respected journals that eventually translates to a book deal or a series of pubs in magazines with national distribution.
Of course, it would be nice to make a living by simply writing short stories. But that day, if it ever existed, is over, and fiction writers have to be satisfied with publishing for fifty bucks and a year's subscription until they work their way up to the admittedly few national publications that pay well for stories.
Like any model, I think this model has its pros and cons. It's a kind of weeding out procedure, on the one hand. On the other, there's a lot of fiction out there published in the New Yorker or Harpers that just isn't that good. Why is it published? My sense is that nepotism plays a part in publishing, just as in any other industry. For those of us without connects, it's a matter of making a name for oneself in the small, well-respected journals that eventually translates to a book deal or a series of pubs in magazines with national distribution.
Wednesday, September 20, 2006
The Nature Theater of Oklahoma
I spent the last couple of weeks attending PICA's TBA:06 art festival and had a blast. PICA's website: www.pica.org. The following is from a blog I posted to during the festival. It's about the Nature Theater of Oklahoma, an experimental theater company from New York, and it rocked the house. Or should I say it danced the house.
In a conversation on Thursday, September 14, 2006, with The Nature Theater of Oklahoma, the most compelling thing that Pavel Liska the director said was that he had conceived of the dance as an anti-narrative, and to that end he decided to use dice to determine the form of the dance. The dice, for him, introduced a level of chance that took him away from received notions of theater and dance—he decided upon the form of the production rather than the narrative. Once the form had been determined through the roll of the dice (and the rolls decided everything: from the number of scenes to the number of actors in each scene, to the number of movements each actor performed), the troupe went about constructing the dance within that chance-derived structure. It highlights the role of luck in our lives, how seemingly connected events are actually circumstantially related, and spotlights the drama inherent in the movements of our everyday existence—what Pavel called the “spectacle of the everyday.”
This spectacle manifested in various hand gestures and body movements that mimicked the kind of seemingly innocuous interactions we have with people every day. Cross legs. Put arm behind head. Look at audience. Bring the cigarette to your lips. Watch two people kiss. Roll out on stage on an office chair. Dance into a mist of breath freshener. Dance--that is the message.
In the production of Ballet Brut, the audience sits in very close quarters and when the production begins, a curtain is drawn about six feet away from the people in the front row. So everybody is very close and then the actors come out, one by one, in front of the curtain. We can hear their breathing, we can see their every detail. And this, for me, resonated with something that came up in their chat: that is, the production is an examination of the spectacle of the everyday. The production was built on small gestures: a hand behind the head, a smirk, a sway of the hips, a flutter of the hands. While there wasn’t a traditional narrative, the gestures built up tension, the glances between actors helped create a sense of expectation for an end, which comes in spectacular fashion. So it is a spectacle, I realized, when the stage is filled with local dancers who mimic the pattern of dance-gestures that the actors have developed over the course of the dance. A disco ball descends, a ballerina pirouettes in the seats opposite and behind the stage dancers who move with frantic grace and energy. It is a climax without much of a message, and that is quite all right, and much of the point.
Check out the website, which doesn't do much justice to the troupe, but there are links to other news items.
http://www.oktheater.org/index.htm
http://www.wweek.com/editorial/3244/7954
In a conversation on Thursday, September 14, 2006, with The Nature Theater of Oklahoma, the most compelling thing that Pavel Liska the director said was that he had conceived of the dance as an anti-narrative, and to that end he decided to use dice to determine the form of the dance. The dice, for him, introduced a level of chance that took him away from received notions of theater and dance—he decided upon the form of the production rather than the narrative. Once the form had been determined through the roll of the dice (and the rolls decided everything: from the number of scenes to the number of actors in each scene, to the number of movements each actor performed), the troupe went about constructing the dance within that chance-derived structure. It highlights the role of luck in our lives, how seemingly connected events are actually circumstantially related, and spotlights the drama inherent in the movements of our everyday existence—what Pavel called the “spectacle of the everyday.”
This spectacle manifested in various hand gestures and body movements that mimicked the kind of seemingly innocuous interactions we have with people every day. Cross legs. Put arm behind head. Look at audience. Bring the cigarette to your lips. Watch two people kiss. Roll out on stage on an office chair. Dance into a mist of breath freshener. Dance--that is the message.
In the production of Ballet Brut, the audience sits in very close quarters and when the production begins, a curtain is drawn about six feet away from the people in the front row. So everybody is very close and then the actors come out, one by one, in front of the curtain. We can hear their breathing, we can see their every detail. And this, for me, resonated with something that came up in their chat: that is, the production is an examination of the spectacle of the everyday. The production was built on small gestures: a hand behind the head, a smirk, a sway of the hips, a flutter of the hands. While there wasn’t a traditional narrative, the gestures built up tension, the glances between actors helped create a sense of expectation for an end, which comes in spectacular fashion. So it is a spectacle, I realized, when the stage is filled with local dancers who mimic the pattern of dance-gestures that the actors have developed over the course of the dance. A disco ball descends, a ballerina pirouettes in the seats opposite and behind the stage dancers who move with frantic grace and energy. It is a climax without much of a message, and that is quite all right, and much of the point.
Check out the website, which doesn't do much justice to the troupe, but there are links to other news items.
http://www.oktheater.org/index.htm
http://www.wweek.com/editorial/3244/7954
Tuesday, September 19, 2006
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