Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: docu-series, documentary, Mind Over Murder, power of theatre, theatre, verbatim, Wrongfully Convicted
Despite my swearing off Wrongfully Convicted podcasts, I found myself watching a similarly themed docu-series recently. I was maybe halfway into the first episode before I realized it was a doozy of a wrongful conviction case. Were it not for the theatre element, I might have quit watching right then. I’m glad I stuck around.
Mind Over Murder is about the impact a murder had on a small town in Nebraska called Beatrice (Bay-AA-trice). Six people were sent to prison for the crime, then pardoned and exonerated but it’s still a painful and contentious issue in the town, even decades after the events. The documentary shows us people who are still convinced that the exonerated people did it and tells the stories of many of the people involved. All of that would have been enough for a fascinating documentary – but happening alongside it is a community theatre production of a verbatim style show about the situation. Not surprisingly, for this theatre maker, the theatrical element was the most touching piece. The show brings the community together in incredibly moving ways and changes minds that previously seemed as though they’d be fixed in their beliefs forever.
For me, it’s a story about the power of theatre. While watching, I wondered how this theatre in small town Nebraska decided to be so brave and bold as to create a verbatim show about something so contentious. Then I wondered how this documentary team managed to find out about them. In reading about it, I was surprised to learn that the theatre piece was a part of it from the start. The show wasn’t independent of the film. The director of the documentary commissioned the local theatre, hired a professional writer/director to create it and had it all integrated from the beginning. The director thought she’d track the actors’ changing points of view – but it was the audience’s change of view that became the most remarkable. The performance brings people together who you’d never have thought would tolerate one another. It changes minds that seemed unchangeable. You see a seismic shift happen in one night at the theatre. Why does theatre work where nothing else had? Nothing. Not the judicial system. Not film. Not time. Not important conversation. Why theatre?
I’ve been thinking about it. And I think it is a strange combination of intimacy and alienation. I think the alienating effect of hearing the words from someone else’s mouth allows someone to hear things you’d otherwise be guarded against. For example, I cannot bear to hear Donald Trump’s voice. I mute it, fast forward through it, sing over it, whatever I have to do to avoid hearing him. I have a visceral response to his voice and face. But when someone reads his words or pretends to be him, I listen closely and watch without all the walls.
For the family of the murdered woman, I imagine the six people who were convicted of the murder were similarly triggering for them. The family could not shift their opinions of them because they were always in the same bodies, with the same voices as before. But in the theatre piece, you’re looking at entirely different people. It makes it possible to see them differently. That alienation effect allows you to let go of some things, I suspect.
And then there is the intimacy of being all in the same room together. You’re sharing space with the actors, those characters and an audience of people who have a wide range of experience and opinions. Crying together, laughing together, can really shift things.
We are really in the room with the story when it’s in a theatre.
I think, too, that it is important that it is the real words that were spoken by the subjects and not a dramatization. If a writer wrote them, then it would be easy to dismiss as a work of fiction. But when a writer has simply taken what was said and shaped it into an evening, it is very hard to dismiss. This style of theatre is called verbatim or documentary style and it can be very powerful.
One of my most profound acting experiences was doing Fires in the Mirror, which is a verbatim play about the Crown Heights riots. There was magic in stepping in to real people’s words and ways of being. I don’t even know Anonymous Young Man #2’s name but he will be with me forever because I can still find his cadence and rhythm in my memory – even though it was over three decades ago. And audience members heard him, too – through me – even though we shared neither race, nor gender. I imagine that discrepancy helped them listen, maybe.
But of course the production of the play in Mind Over Murder was way more powerful because it was not only performed by members of the community but for members of the community, including people featured in the story. That raises the stakes exponentially. It’s brave of the theatre company and maybe that’s why it has such a profound effect in the end, because everyone can see what it took to get everyone together in one space.
The documentary doesn’t reveal its own role in setting up this production. I suppose it prefers to have us believe that the community itself had the idea. But I think it’s kind of beautiful that one artist commissioned other artists to make something healing. And maybe some other community, reeling from some other trauma, might take up the challenge to do something like this for itself. Maybe we could find a way to fund the arts so communities across the country could create similarly cathartic and healing works. That’s a project I’d sign up for in a heartbeat.
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Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Boomers, Facebook, Generation X, Instagram, Millennials, silos, Social Media, TikTok, twitter
The venue told us to tag them on social media so they could share our posts. I said, “We’ve tagged you multiple times on Twitter, TikTok and Facebook. Are you not seeing them?” “Oh,” they said, “We’re not active there. I guess it’s really just Instagram.”
For some people (mostly Millennials, I guess), “Social media” just means Instagram. I happen to loathe Instagram the most. So for me, I lean toward Twitter and Facebook – but it’s all social media to me. I still post things to Instagram, even though I don’t like it. I figure I can’t afford to leave anyone out. Sometimes something hits on LinkedIn. Sometimes a thing is a hit on TikTok. It’s possible that these are sort of generational silos, where different generations gather in one place or another. I guess since Friendster and MySpace are gone. Gen X tends to go wherever – and I think that is actually a useful instinct because our numbers are small. So when sharing our work, for example, we can’t just talk to ourselves.
If you just use the social media that your generation is using, you risk silo-ing yourself and your ideas. The venue that doesn’t use their TikTok account is mostly not communicating with its (possible) younger audience. Twitter is a cesspool, I know, I can understand why you’d skip it – but there are still a lot of people on there, it’s still the place to go in a crisis or time sensitive event and I’m not even sure it skews to any particular generation. Gen X trends on Twitter a lot but it’s usually because someone has left us out of some list or article again – and Twitter tends to share that with me because it knows I’m likely to click on it.
But I don’t think that means it’s a Gen X platform, even if it was invented by a Gen X-er and currently run by (a highly embarrassing) one.
Younger people say Facebook is over-run with Boomers but that’s where I still find most of my Gen X friends – and my Millennial ones, too, really. So – if you think you’re just leaving out the oldsters when you ignore Facebook, I might look at that more closely. Unless, I guess, Millennials are the oldsters now? The elder ones are in their early forties.
When Twitter started tanking, I was surprised to see a lot more activity on LinkedIn. I’m not sure how to describe that lane except that it’s where I tend to have conversations with guys in tech and women in voice acting.
I have known for some time that I was missing a lot by not engaging with Instagram more. I found ways to post this podcast there and I’d pop in, post, scroll through maybe three posts and then get out of there. I know I was leaving some engagement on the table, as it were, but I just couldn’t bring myself to it much. Then, I hired a producer for my audio drama who is very much at home an Instagram. I gave her the keys to the company Insta and watched her work her magic. Likes and follows like I’d never seen before!
I have accounts on Twitter, Mastodon, Blue Sky, Hive, TikTok, LinkedIn, Facebook, Reddit, Tumblr and Instagram. It does feel crazy to have to keep all these spaces active but in trying to promote things (and I am constantly trying to promote things – this blog, the blogcast, the audio dramas, shows, etc). I can’t afford to ignore any audience. For my last audio drama, the audience numbers skewed heavily Gen X. This time we’re most popular with older Gen Z and younger Millennials. Gen X and Boomers are listening too but we’ve got no numbers for the elder Millennials this time. (These numbers are inaccurate; I know because several people from those age groups have let me know they’re listening.) I’m tickled to be reaching an age bracket I’ve never reached before. It’s nice! Is it because we’re on TikTok? Who knows? But I am leaving the possibility open. We go where the people are, even if it means maintaining too many accounts.
Do I LIKE trying to stay present and posting to so many places? Nope. It’s draining and silly. Personally, I’m happiest on Facebook because I engage with my friends and family there – but I can’t just promote my work to my friends and family. That’s not fair to them and it doesn’t help spread my stuff around. It’s just so clear to me that, while it’s very popular to leave platforms in blazes of glory, they do each have their own audiences and if you want to speak to everyone, you’ve got to go to as many places as possible. Your home silo might be comfortable but it won’t open you out to a wider world. Of course, the other platforms might not either but at least you’re not isolating yourself from them. And as far as I know, that venue who told us to tag them never shared a single one of our posts, even on Instagram – so maybe it was all an excuse.
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Filed under: art, Creative Process, space, technology, theatre | Tags: audiences, audio, podcasts, theater, theatre, Zoom
A friend of mine has developed a show to be performed on Zoom. It’s an innovative concept and she’s doing that innovating in a form where people don’t necessarily expect to see innovation. She asked someone to attend this show and they said, “I don’t do Zoom,” which understandably got under my friend’s skin a little bit. It’s a little like someone saying they don’t go to the theatre when you give them a postcard for your show in a theatre.
Now, the truth is, I don’t do Zoom either (if I can help it) but I would never say that to someone inviting me to their Zoom show. They don’t need that information or need to have it delivered like that. For me, I wish it were not so, but almost every Zoom I’ve ever had has ended with me sobbing on the floor, or in bed with a migraine. I’ve been in Zoom shows, watched Zoom shows, had Zoom rehearsals, Zoom meetings and Zoom parties and the experience has always been more or less the same. And weirdly, the more fun the activity is, the more acute my response. I wish it were not so but it is, unfortunately, the case for me. Everyone thinks their show or their meeting or their rehearsal will be the exception but unfortunately, it’s not the content for me – just the format. It’s weird. I know it’s weird but a pattern is a pattern. I’ve probed it, investigated it and the pattern tends to hold.
But the fact that I personally cannot happily engage with Zoom doesn’t mean I don’t notice when someone is doing extraordinary things with the form. Making stuff on Zoom is hard! It’s like making a movie (or multiple movies!) and a play at the same time! It’s very difficult! But I still think people should do it. Not me, of course, I get enough migraines as it is – but I do think it is incredibly important for artists to take hold of new forms and make new art out of them. I’m incredibly proud of my friend. I’m an advocate for it, even if I can’t watch it myself. (Check it out! She MIGHT have an encore show in the works and if you join her Patreon, you might be able to see it.)
Creating work on Zoom opens up space to a radical accessibility. It can include people who are not able to leave their homes, which is something, historically, theatre has been unable to do. (Side note: Back in the early days of my theatre company, we used to joke about doing something called PJ Theatre where we imagined we’d go to someone’s bedroom to put on a show so they wouldn’t have to leave their beds. Zoom is pretty close to that!) Zoom can also reach beyond geographical boundaries and connect with people around the world. It’s a means to create a global theatre. I love that. But, of course, even the most inclusive format can still exclude some people. Not everyone can stomach Zoom and for some it triggers some pandemic PTSD. But I feel like people like me are probably in the minority and it’s important to innovate in this form and to serve the people who AREN’T like me. It is important and meaningful work to do.
I feel like I can relate to my friend’s experience of the “I don’t do Zoom” person because I get similar responses when I tell people about my podcasts. There are a lot of people out there who have never listened to a podcast and a lot of them are not likely to. Only 38% of Americans have listened to a podcast in the last month. It may seem like everyone has a podcast but not everyone is interested in listening to them. I have taken several people’s phones and physically subscribed them to my podcasts and still, I suspect that they haven’t listened. There are people out there, people I love, who just don’t listen to audio. It’s not just that they don’t know how to listen to a podcast, they don’t listen to the radio, either. Or even music. They just don’t love to engage with stuff through their ears, I guess. They are never going to listen to my audio dramas, no matter how much they love me. I’m learning how to not take that personally. It’s not me, it’s the format.
In recent years, I’ve mostly been making audio, though, so I thought, hey, for our next one, we should do it live so that the people who prefer the theatre bit can come and have the live theatre experience. But so few people came, I’m not sure I believe the “I prefer live theatre” people anymore. In the four performances, spread out over four months, we sold maybe ten tickets? I had two friends come out to see it. Contrast that with the 673 podcast plays we’ve had on the audio drama so far. One of these things has a much larger reach than the other.
Theatre has become more and more expensive to make. It is prohibitively difficult to produce as an indie maker. On top of that it has become vastly more difficult to get audiences to come out for things. I had two friends come to see our show (Thank you friends!) but most people involved with our show had zero friends come, even with the most liberal comp policy you can imagine.
Part of the reason that my friend turned to Zoom to produce her show is that it is affordable. You don’t have to rent a theatre to put a show up on-line. Theatres cost a lot of money to rent. The affordability factor is true for me and audio, as well. Putting up shows that very few people are going to come to is very expensive and involves a lot more annoying fundraising emails.
Theatre is my first love but, at the moment, it is almost impossible to make in its usual form. For theatre to work, you have to have an audience and when audiences stop coming, you have to expect that makers are going to migrate to other forms, some of which you (or journalists) might not like. I was told by a theatre journalist that theatre journalists won’t cover podcasts. I’d be upset about it except that theatre journalists rarely covered my theatre in recent years either, so…no real loss there.
Anyway – when someone pitches you a show in a new form, maybe applaud them for it, even if you know you’ll never go there. I understand the impulse to try and explain that it’s not personal, that you just don’t do whatever the form is but I’m not sure telling me you don’t like audio or telling my friend you don’t do Zoom helps much. In the big scheme of things, most people don’t come to our shows and they never tell us why. But people who do come to our shows, who tell us why they came and (if we’re very lucky) tell us they enjoyed it, those are some adventurers in new media and our arts heroes.
This post was brought to you by my patrons on Patreon.
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It’s also called Songs for the Struggling Artist
You can find the podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.
Every podcast features a song at the end. Some of those songs are on Spotify, Apple Music, my website, ReverbNation, Deezer, Bandcamp and Amazon Music.
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Filed under: Uncategorized
It’s been a long while since I’ve done a rejection post. This is partly due to applying to fewer things but also because sometimes I feel like I’ve written the rejection post even as I was applying. These three Queens-based grants were like that. They were a lot of work and I was fighting it at every stage. First, it was the Grant Info session I was required to attend and then it was filling out the three similar applications but not similar enough that I could copy and paste. Like, in one more or less identical question, the word count was very different. That is – I’d found a way to say the thing and then had to re-write it to say the same thing in a lot fewer words. I got hung up on some issues that come up every time I have a grant to write. Then AI wrote a podcast description for me and realized how having AI write a grant for me might be the best possible use of AI. Then, believe it or not, an application portal asked me to fill out a survey on how I’d feel about AI in grants and I was shockingly all for it. That’s because I learned from the podcast AI that writing bullshit language and puffery is what AI excels at. It is not what I excel at and would be delighted to hand over that work to a bot.
Anyway – in writing all those pieces, I was pretty sure I’d already lost with these grants so it was NO SURPRISE to get those emails. Two of them were a note saying it had information about my grant application, that then provided a link to a page where it said, “Declined.” And while I appreciate brevity in a rejection notice, making me click over to a website to get it seemed unnecessarily complex, and frankly a little cowardly. Anyway – SURPRISE! I did not get the grants I was pretty sure I was not going to get.
But I did apply to other stuff. I was recently rejected by the Woodward/Newman Award which I applied to, like, a year ago? Pretty decent rejection letter and an easy application, I got to hand it to them.
I did this Submit 1 Event– not because I thought I’d be accepted anywhere but because the mission feels very important to me. Apparently women submit to journals and literary publications very infrequently, as compared to men…and it just feels like a good move to be a part of a movement to change that. I got rejections from The Kenyon Review, New England Review and American Poetry Review. For two short plays and one poem! A very old poem!
In looking at my file of rejections, I discovered that I did not log any of the rejections of 2023 – so let me catch up a little here. For plays I submitted, I was rejected for Premiere Stages at Kean University (an extra sting here as my grandmother used to work there), the Henley Rose Award, USF Words3, National Playwrights Conference at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center, Blue Ink and the New Harmony Project.
And speaking of the New Harmony Project, this is one of those that friends like to tell me I should apply to because it’s so great and they take good care of the writers. And it’s very sweet how they assume I don’t have a whole bunch of rejection notices from here already. There’s a residency I’ve been recommended like this, too – where I have friends say, “You should apply!” Oh, should I? Like the 15 times I have already applied? Great idea. I mean, it is a compliment. These folks assume I would have gotten in if I had applied so they think they need to tell me to apply. It’s a kindness really. But also funny. And yes, of course, none of those people read this blog. They’d know like you do if they did.
I also received a rejection from the VCCA, where I did once get waitlisted a few years ago, never to hear anything again. I’ve heard a lot of good things about VCCA, too, from a former resident artist there. But none of these things are up to me.
Do you need some good news after all that?
Over on Goodpods’ Indie Fiction charts, The Dragoning hit number 24 and The Defense got to 55. I‘m ahead of myself! Literally! (But also behind myself!) And of course those numbers have already changed but still! And the podcast that accompanies this blog is at 21 on the Indie Arts Weekly Charts. It’s gotten as far as 13 on that chart. I’m waiting to break the top ten before I break out the bubbly, though.
*Wondering why I’m telling you about rejections? Read my initial post about this here and my patron’s idea about that here.
This post was brought to you by my patrons on Patreon.
They also bring you the podcast version of the blog.
It’s also called Songs for the Struggling Artist
You can find the podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.
Every podcast features a song at the end. Some of those songs are on Spotify, Apple Music, my website, ReverbNation, Deezer, Bandcamp and Amazon Music.
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Filed under: art, Creative Process, theatre | Tags: art, planning, projects, the void, What now?, What's Next?
There are probably some artists that aren’t utterly flummoxed by the question “What’s next?” but I am not one of them. It’s usually an inner cascade of “Oh dear god, I don’t know! How will I go on with no real plan! This person just wants a simple answer. I have nothing. No plans. Nothing is next! I’m doomed!” This is not because I don’t have any possibilities on the horizon. I’m just not ready to look at the horizon, particularly if I’m in the middle of a project. Maybe to regular people, with regular jobs, “What’s next?” seems like a perfectly normal question – but to me, and a lot of artists I know, it is fraught with challenging uncertain questions.
I think, for a lot of us artists, particularly theatre artists, we are a fairly present oriented people. We focus on what is in front of us, not what may be in front of us way down the line.
Even artists who go from gig to gig, who somehow have their next show lined up for after this one might tense up at the question of What is Next. We are a superstitious people and we know nothing is a given. Sure, we could have a show scheduled now but there’s no guarantee that that show is going to happen. Even if we know what’s next, we might not necessarily want to talk about it. I think this quality is particularly exacerbated in theatre people since 2020 having seen our entire field shut down. We rarely feel certain of anything.
With one another, we generally learn to tread carefully in this arena. We don’t ask each other what’s next. We ask what we’re up to. If the person is doing a show or working on something, they’ll tell us. We don’t tend to pry because if it’s a dry spell, no one really enjoys talking about that.
For me, my work moves in cycles. I don’t often run quickly from one thing to the next anymore. As a young person, I went from show to show to show and sometimes did multiple shows at a time. That’s just not possible in a professional context. It’s not sustainable and there’s just not a mechanism for making that happen at this stage. Even the most successful artists who do manage to move from one project to the next still have fallow periods.
I know maybe two artists who could tell you what’s next with no trouble. Even Kristen Wiig, who is an enormously successful actor, writer and creative person, recently said in the Hollywood Reporter, “I was living day to day and had ideas of things I wanted to do, but with this business, you can’t predict. I don’t know what I’m going to do for the next year.” Even Kristen Wiig doesn’t know what’s next!
For many of us, “What’s next?” can look like a cliff we’re about to fall off of. It’s a void. It’s a crevasse.
And for the most part, we’ve adapted to a life of regular encounters with the void – but somehow someone asking, “What’s next?” can feel extra confrontational. It feels like someone asking, “Have you stared into the void yet?” (Yes, yes, of course I have. I still have some more void staring to do, thank you.)
And yet, hilariously, weeks after writing this, I closed a show and found several people on my team asking me this same question. I was shocked. But I recognize – for some of them – asking me what’s next is not so much about what I might be up to but asking what projects they might find me casting or hiring for. It’s a way to see what might next for them, too. I get that. But their work was done when we closed, while I still had six more episodes to edit. There’s no next yet! It’s still this for me! Ask me again in six weeks. Or, actually, make that eight. I need at least two weeks of void staring.
“What’s next?” can be a hard question for an artist, especially one who generates their own material. Are you asking because you don’t want to miss my next thing? Don’t worry. When it comes time to share our next project, I will. I won’t be able to shut up about it, what with the crowdfunding and the publicity and the marketing. Ask me about those projects then – not when they’re just theories hanging out past the void. I promise you that hearing about what I’m doing NOW is a much more interesting conversation than what might be next.
This post was brought to you by my patrons on Patreon.
They also bring you the podcast version of the blog.
It’s also called Songs for the Struggling Artist
You can find the podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.
Every podcast features a song at the end. Some of those songs are on Spotify, Apple Music, my website, ReverbNation, Deezer, Bandcamp and Amazon Music.
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Want to help me make whatever’s next?
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Filed under: advice, Creative Process, podcasting, writing | Tags: growing your audience, JoJo Siwa, podcasting, promotion, Social Media, spotify, videos
Since I have several podcasts that are now hosted by Spotify, I receive their newsletter (four copies, one for each podcast) which offers podcasting tips. I mostly ignore them, as I have read MANY tips previously and there’s rarely anything new. I clicked on the most recent one though, since it was about how to grow your audience. I’m in the middle of putting out a new podcast so I figured I could use some reminders of that kind of information.
Ultimately, there was nothing in it I hadn’t seen before but something about it made me think about what they were suggesting in a new way. So many tips involved making some other form of media alongside the podcast. It felt like they were saying that in order to have success as a podcaster, you had to make videos. To bring ears to your podcast, you should also write a newsletter. It struck me as absolutely absurd. In order to create one thing, you have to become expert at several others. Let me tell you, I didn’t get into audio to make video. If I wanted to make videos, I’d make videos! (And I have made a couple!)
And as annoyed as this advice made me, I acknowledge that it’s probably correct. I’m already doing it, honestly. For my latest audio drama, our producer has made multiple videos, some of which have done better than almost anything else we’ve put out in the world. I think they might help us bring people to the podcast. But I find the whole notion of having to do it infuriating. In order to create one thing, we have to now become masters of several other things to even be seen (or heard). We have to become advertisers, video makers, newsletter writers, copy writers, audio experts, etc. This is why podcasts that come from public radio stations do so much better than the rest of us. They have a staff for all those other aspects.
It didn’t use to be like this back in the early days of our theatre. If we put on a show, we put on a show. That’s pretty much it. We made postcards and posters, sure – but that’s about the extent of it. We did the art we were there to do.
I find it ridiculous that the way to “grow your audience” in one medium is to increase your presence in another. It feels like I wanted to get better at driving a car and instead of driving cars, someone advises me to start driving boats. It just very much feels like very different things. You might say, “Well, it’s all media” – but really? Driving a boat and driving a car are both driving but they are also VERY DIFFERENT. It also feels like this advice to grow a podcast by doing all these other things is essentially asking every podcaster to become a whole media studio. Make videos! Make ads! Make calculated social media posts! Interview famous people! And I see how these things help. I really do. But people do all those things for jobs these days, and I don’t love my chances in competing for social media eyeballs when everyone else has training and a salary. In that podcast I wrote about last time, Ezra Klein said that the middle is competing with the huge. That is, in the fight for attention, even things like the New York Times are the middle now and Facebook and Google are at the overwhelming top. The little guys down at the bottom of the attention economy don’t stand much of a chance when even the big guns aren’t the big guns anymore.
The thing is, it’s clear from everything I’ve read that no one knows how to grow an audience, especially for podcasts. It’s a crapshoot, like anything.
I was just reading an article about the girl group started by mega tween pop sensation, JoJo Siwa. You’d think the people who got Siwa’s career started (her mom, really) would know how to make a girl group a hit – but as the article said “The world did not pick this group…They’ve pulled every lever…It’s been almost two years. They’re not going to make it.” These people were making videos and social media content out the wazoo (and doing it mostly unpaid) and the world has mostly shrugged. Maybe instead of doing all that promotion, they could have made some more music, developed the songs a bit more (and maybe not behaved abominably to the girls, which is what the article was actually about). I don’t know. But I do know that that story highlights an arts and media landscape where everyone has to do everything, where there’s always another job to do, even for people who have already experienced some success.
But also, I’m not 100% convinced that a success in an adjacent media actually translates to success in the thing you’re trying to promote. We got 830 views on a TikTok video but that didn’t lead to any uptick in listens to the podcast or ticket sales to the live recordings. It was basically meaningless. 830 views is just 830 views on the platform it’s on. Likes on your promo material don’t necessarily lead to eyes or ears on the thing you’re promoting.
I think of novelists now who are required to be on social media, promoting their work. They can’t just write novels; They also have to create media followings and probably their publishers are telling them they should make videos, too. I doubt that most novelists are videographers at heart. Everyone’s a videographer these days. And sure, I’ll do it. I’ll make videos if I have to because I don’t make things for no one to see them and it somehow seems like the thing to do now. At least that’s what everyone says but the business around it all feels pretty dark and terrible.
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Filed under: art, community, technology, voting, writing | Tags: clicks, Ezra Klein, Internet, Jezebel, journalism, local news, New York magazine, Rebecca Traister, Search Engine, tech, The Onion, weird quirky websites
The podcast I was listening to was about the crisis in journalism – about how so many news sites were disappearing, how so many journalists are losing their jobs and about how the landscape was changing so dramatically and not for the better. (This country has lost one third of its newspapers and two thirds of its journalists since 2005 and it is accelerating.) I was only half listening – truth be told. I was still pretty wiped out from COVID and I was dozing a fair amount. But then – after a history lesson in how journalism was funded and then how that landscape shifted and then shifted again – I sat bolt upright at a concept the guest (Ezra Klein) brought up. He said we should not think of ourselves as consumers of the internet but as generators. His feeling was that we are all rather passively engaging with the internet, without realizing that we are creating it while we do that. Basically, the idea is that we are creating with our clicks. What we engage with and look at and pay attention to is the internet we create. If I want to see local news, I have to subscribe to local news – or at the very least – visit local news sites. If I want more independent media, I have to read independent media. I can’t just wish for these things to exist.
I recognize my own behavior in this. When Jezebel was shut down, I was pretty upset! RIP the last popular feminist media! But I hadn’t visited Jezebel in ages. Truthfully, since they were bought by G/O Media – they were starting to fall apart. But even before then, I wasn’t over there much. I appreciated that Jezebel existed but I didn’t do anything to help continue its existence. (I learned while researching for this that it is coming back via Paste Magazine. Hooray for Zombie Jezebel!) As Klein said, if you want the publication to continue you have to read it. If you want the podcast to continue, you have to listen to it. If you want an internet with blogs and independent media, you have to read them. We create our own internet.
In other words, wailing about the evils of social media while continuing to scroll through it for hours, doesn’t help create alternatives. If we go through the portals of social media to get to our media, we are enforcing the need for social media to filter our media for us. I do this. And I get the internet that I create – a world filtered by Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, Bsky, Mastodon, etc. If I like something, I can’t wait for it to show up in a feed, I have to go directly to it. Additionally, Facebook has been showing people less and less news in their feeds. This has throttled traffic to news media which has, in turn, lost them a lot of advertising dollars and threatened their existence. Or killed it entirely. If I want it, I have to go to the thing and click there.
I have often thought of this from my own perspective of my needs as an artist, engaging with the internet. There are a lot of people who express that they’re glad I do what I do but only a handful that engage with my work and even fewer that support it. This is as true of my off-line theatre making as it is with my podcasts, my blogs or music. I know directly what happens when people don’t engage with my work. (I feel bad mostly.) But there have definitely been times where the direct line of a project living or dying is very clear. Our first season of our first audio drama, The Dragoning, took almost a year to finish because the funding was so slow to come in. We weren’t holding episodes back because we wanted to be withholding – we just literally couldn’t make a new episode until we reached the episode budget. Eventually, we got there. And the show has charted around the world. But it was clear there was a big disconnect for a lot of people between support for the podcast and its ability to be made. And it’s not just about money. If more people had listened to the show, (downloaded the show, even put it on play and walked out to do something else), if we’d gotten more numbers, perhaps we could have found some funding through advertising. But podcast advertising is a numbers game and if you’re not getting a minimum of a thousand downloads an episode, it’s not a game you can play. I had ads on the podcast version of this blog for a week and a half and made a grand total of $1.38. It’s very clear to me, as a creator, how peoples’ investment can make the life or death difference in a creation. I don’t know why I hadn’t really put it together as a user of the internet.
As Klein put it, “If you want Pitchfork to exist, you have to read it.” Anything we want on the internet (and I would argue, out in the world, too) we have to engage with it. Ezra Klein on Search Engine:
“Every time you read one thing over another or watch or listen to our spend time on, you are creating more of that thing and less of other things, right? There is still some money that comes from just, like, your attention. Then a level above that, when you pay for anything, when you become a member or subscriber, then you’re really sending a signal to generate more of that thing and not of the other.”
We turned the vibrant disparate quirky internet into a series of social media sites. And if we like that – cool – that’s what we have. But if we want other things, we have to engage with them and we also have to pay for them. I really want to do this. I want more art; I want to pay for more artists. (I’d love to support my fellow artists on Patreon: like Alexandra Scott, Betsy VanDeusen, Dance Naked Creative, Monica Byrne, Michael Harren and so many more.) And when I start to make a living wage, that’s the first thing I’m going to do. Meanwhile, though, to create the internet I want to see in the world, I have to actually click on my values. I can’t just like the funny Onion headline on Twitter, I have to click on the article and go read it – on the Onion’s website. If I want more Onion, I have to read the Onion.
But this is the thing, though, I used to read the Onion cover to cover when it was a paper publication I could just pick up on the street. Now I have to remind myself to click when I see an article go by on social media. And once I get over there, I don’t read that whole issue. I just read what I came for and get out. I’m guessing we’re not going back to paper but it was a lot better for some things. I currently read every issue of New York magazine because I subscribe to it. It comes in the mail and then I read it. For me, subscribing means I get both local news and a way to voice my support for one of my favorite journalists (Rebecca Traister, who writes there). I know other publications languish because I chose that one. That’s my current vote – since I don’t really read much news on the internet. Which I guess is also a vote. But if I want the old quirky internet full of funky weird websites, I have to visit those!
Oh hey, if you need some ideas on stuff to click on, I put a bunch of links in this piece. Click away!
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Every podcast features a song at the end. Some of those songs are on Spotify, Apple Music, my website, ReverbNation, Deezer, Bandcamp and Amazon Music.
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Filed under: anger, pandemic | Tags: anger, coronavirus, Covid 19, positive, symptom
On Monday, March 4th, I tested positive for COVID. I tested negative on March 1st when I woke up with a swollen throat and subsequently slept for the later part of the weekend. By Monday, the fever had gone and I was feeling a bit better. But I tested anyway because I had a rehearsal to go to and I wanted to be able to go in clear. Surprise!
The thing is – I have been very careful. I’ve rarely eaten indoors at a restaurant. I don’t go indoors for longer than a couple of minutes without a mask. I wear a mask on the subway and also the grocery store, two places I’m often alone in my caution. The week before I tested positive, I’d barely gone anywhere. The lone risks I was taking were related to my show – rehearsing and attending our shows without masks and celebrating our performances indoors unmasked afterwards. That’s it. I knew I was taking those risks (for the first time) and I did it with full awareness of what I was doing. If they’d have been responsible for this case, I would have felt it was an appropriate consequence of the risk but all those things were three weeks before I caught it. I don’t know where this came from. And after nearly four years of doing everything in my power to keep this virus from spreading through me, it knocked me down and stole all my lunch money, the bully. And I was pissed.
I’ve been so mad. About everything. I could not receive an email from anyone without becoming irrationally angry. Is anger a symptom of COVID 19? I haven’t heard anyone talk about that but oh my goodness, I was so full of anger during my week of COVID! It seemed like it might be some virus triggered irritant in my brain that made everything seem irritating. I went to a Feldenkrais eye workshop a few years ago that somehow spoke directly to my amygdala and made me afraid to leave my apartment for a day so I feel fairly confident that brains and emotions can be impacted by things like viruses. This has been my working theory because it feels pretty irrational to get mad at innocuous emails and texts and so on. I found everything irritating. My own work, my space, my self – music, theatre, videos, social media. It was all awful.
I felt like it had to be a symptom. Because I couldn’t just hate everything could I? I couldn’t just be pissed about the circumstances.
I suppose I could be angry that after four years of taking every precaution, I got this thing anyway. It feels an awful lot like four years of wasted effort. But I know that’s not true. It is a much less terrible situation to get COVID now than it was four years ago. I’d had all the vaccines and boosters to make it not that big a deal. It is a whole different ball game now, for which I am grateful.
But the thing is – I haven’t been so careful for myself. I figure my immune system was probably in good shape but I was mostly careful in solidarity with people who might be a lot more vulnerable than me. I wasn’t afraid of this for me – but for them. I didn’t wear a mask for me so much, as for the people who need extra protections. And if I couldn’t prevent this, being as careful as I have been, what hope do any of those people have? I’m incredibly frustrated that we, as a society, have so little care for the vulnerable. Like, what good can one person in mask on the train do? Apparently not much. Maybe that’s why people stopped wearing them.
I’ve given up a lot for this safety. One of my greatest pleasures in life is to sit in a warm cozy café and write. I haven’t done that in so long. Instead, I sit outside, shivering under heat lamps, writing with cold fingers. I love restaurants but I only sit outside of them for the most part. I’ve been to the movies twice since 2019. And the theatre I’ve seen has been pretty minimal in the last year since people don’t wear masks at the theatre anymore – even when the theatre has signs around declaring that they prefer you wear them.
I know everyone stopped worrying about COVID a while ago but that doesn’t mean it went away. And now it is tearing through a lot of people who managed to avoid it all this time. I know quite a few people who got COVID recently who, like me, never had it before. Many people say it’s just inevitable, that we just have to all expect to get it sooner or later, or again and again. But there are a lot of people who will not survive that and that is not okay with me. A man who survived in an iron lung for 70 years died of COVID this month. There’s no word about how he got it. Probably from someone who figured it was inevitable, who had contact with someone who had contact with him.
Now that we’re treating this virus like an inevitability, it’s tearing through people who could have remained untouched by it with a little extra collective precaution. All the little individual precautions are not strong enough to keep the whole wave at bay. I’m pissed because I’m not convinced it was an inevitability. I think if we’d handled this pandemic better, we wouldn’t still be watching COVID roll through our population four years later. Pretending it’s not happening isn’t working. It got me sick. It got some of my family sick. It got friends sick. It got my support system sick. It’s still going on. And sure – I had a blessedly mild case – but I lost a week of my life and I put some people I care about at risk before I knew it was happening. That sucks. The first day I had symptoms, when I tested negative, I was planning to go see someone with leukemia. I really thought I just had allergies. It felt like allergies. Luckily – we both were extra cautious so we postponed. But that could have been a disaster. I’m glad we averted the disaster. But I’m pissed that it was such a close call. But maybe that’s just a symptom of the virus.
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Filed under: art, Creative Process, feminism, theatre, writing | Tags: art, Elizabeth Gilbert, pairs, theatre, theme, writing
Close observers of my work might notice some commonalities between my most recent audio drama, The Defense, and my previous audio drama, The Dragoning. They both feature nice women who develop magical defensive and destructive abilities. They both hinge on fear and power. They are structured very differently and the contexts are not the same, but at the center of both are nice and dangerous women. You might say I’m trying to work something out.
We’re in the middle of rehearsing for and recording The Defense and sometimes I’ve found myself self-conscious about the things these audio dramas have in common. I imagine some critic saying. “Doesn’t this woman have any other ideas?” But, of course, I do have other ideas. I have so many other ideas! But when an idea presents itself for realization, sometimes you just have to move forward, even if you’ve looked at a particular theme before. You don’t throw ideas back into the muse’s face when she presents them to you, even if they look a little like one you received before.
I think a lot about Elizabeth Gilbert’s concept of ideas floating around in the atmosphere, waiting for artists to grab them and bring them into being. It explains why multiple artists get the same idea at the same time sometimes. And it also explains why the same artist might take another crack at a concept or idea they’ve explored before.
In thinking about it, I realized that I have previously created in pairs like this before. When the Dobbs decision went down, I wrote two short speculative fiction abortion plays – one right after the other. They’re very different from one another – different futures, following the lines of logic in the anti-choice movement. But the plays were both between ten and twenty minutes long and they both extended their speculations in kind of extreme ways. You might say I was trying to work something out.
Watching this happen with my creative writing, seeing how I’ve been writing in pairs, I wonder where I might have done this before. I was pretty hung up on Greek myths in the early days. I wrote way more of those than two. But I was definitely trying to work something out. But I don’t think the other things I wrote in those days obviously pair up like this recent work.
I suppose the thread that flows through most of what I’ve made in the last eight years has been my rage at watching women’s rights roll back, at watching the patriarchy claw its way back up on top. I guess I haven’t had much space for other things. I’ve had to be responsive to this disheartening world that began to show its face in 2016. I think I will maybe stop writing in pairs like this if and when things turn around for the better. If they don’t, I guess I’ll be working things out in multiple ways for a long time to come.
This post was brought to you by my patrons on Patreon.
They also bring you the podcast version of the blog.
It’s also called Songs for the Struggling Artist
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Every podcast features a song at the end. Some of those songs are on Spotify, Apple Music, my website, ReverbNation, Deezer, Bandcamp and Amazon Music.
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Filed under: business, writing, economics | Tags: business, drugstores, enshittification, locking up the stuff, Postal Service, Rot Economy, shoplifting, toothpaste, USPS, zines
A while back, I wrote about how they started locking up the toothpaste at my chain pharmacy/drugstore. Since then the drugstore has only expanded their lock-up program. Now, they lock up soap and deodorant and vitamins and eye drops and much more. There were a lot of news stories about this; These big drug stores (CVS, Walgreens, Rite Aid, etc) were claiming that there was a massive theft problem at their stores and they needed help to fix it.
But then, those stories were debunked. Not only has theft not gone up, it has, in fact, gone down. It turns out that these big drug stores are attempting to make more money by getting governments to pay for their security – because of all this CRIME that’s increasing. This has worked for them. Here In New York, our governor just launched an initiative that would give these places a tax break and provide extra security for them.
And this is after the idea of a shoplifting crime wave has been debunked. Despite the reporting that reveals that the “crime wave” numbers’ only source was a lobbying group, these places are apparently still crying “shoplifting” wolf and given Hochul’s response, they’re getting away with it, big time.
I guess they’re still trying to push this fiction because they’re locking up more stuff than ever before and I know at least three people who don’t buy stuff there because of it. Are they trying to go out of business?
The only reason I go in to the drugstore where they lock up the toothpaste is because my prescriptions got transferred there when my more local pharmacy stopped taking my insurance. Then, the pharmacy I wanted to transfer to went out of business last year. These big drug stores push out the little shops so they are the only place to buy vitamins or toothpaste or whatever – but then they lock up those things and drive us right into Amazon’s arms. And once the Vitamin D is being delivered to me, why would I go back to the drug store?
Then I started to think about all this and the post office. Every year I mail out the zines I make for my patrons on Patreon. Every year, I bring the envelopes to the post office, get the stamps required to mail them, affix them and off they’d go around the world. Mailing day was kind of a fun annual ritual. This year, though, when I went to the very same postal worker as the year before, she told me that my zines were books and must be mailed as parcels. This process was twice as expensive and required that the postal worker type in the zip code for every single package, print two labels for each and then affix them to the envelope. It took ages and the line behind me grew and grew as the afternoon went on. There was only one window open and I was at it.
Type. (Clickety clickety clickety.) Press Yes. Wait. Wait Again. Okay they’ve printed. Stick. Stick. Throw it in the mail bin. Next. Repeat twenty times.
They had a perfectly reasonable system for years. Many years. I’ve been making these for eight years, I think? But some policy change means that a perfectly efficient system of mailing little envelopes of homemade goodness has become twice as expensive and an incredible time-waster at the post office, not just for me but for the workers and all the customers in line.
I didn’t send all of them, though. To send these zines to Europe this time, they told me, would cost $20 so I decided I would explore some other options. It just doesn’t make sense to pay $20 to send 27 pieces of paper over the ocean. As I walked home from the post office I thought, “Are they TRYING to go out of business?” And then I remembered how Trump had appointed DeJoy as Postmaster General and remembered how we still have that guy in the top postal job. He’s a businessman who seems wants to run the Post Office into the ground and so I thought, “Yeah, I guess they ARE trying to go out of business!”
Everywhere it feels like business are trying to go out of business. So many places don’t worry about alienating their customers. Every tech platform has gone through an intense enshittification and everything seems to be falling victim to the Rot Economy (a concept I heard about on a podcast). It would seem that the preferred way to do business these days is to try to go out of business. It goes like this. First, create a business that meets people’s needs. Then kill any other businesses that might meet people’s needs in a way similar to yours. Then provide only the most minimal service one can provide and throw up as many obstacles as possible.
The thing is, even though they seem to be trying to go out of business, in a lot of cases, they’ve grown “too big to fail” so they remain. And we all just get more and more frustrated. Anyway – I don’t get anything but my drugs at the drugstore anymore and I just went to a different post office to mail my international zines at a more sensible rate. Hilariously, though, at that post office, their system was down and only the self-service kiosk was working. Someone came in with a big package and they told her she’d have to go to a different post office. “I’ll just come back tomorrow,” she said. But they told her it wasn’t likely to be fixed tomorrow. (Why would that neighborhood need a working post office?!) Giving our post offices inadequate tech seems like yet another way to send the post office out of business. I don’t mind if the big drug stores take themselves out of business with their silly locking the stuff up policies. Maybe we’d get our local pharmacies back in that scenario. But the post office? I’d very much like for our country to have a reasonable postal system again
This post was brought to you by my patrons on Patreon.
They also bring you the podcast version of the blog.
It’s also called Songs for the Struggling Artist
You can find the podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.
Every podcast features a song at the end. Some of those songs are on Spotify, Apple Music, my website, ReverbNation, Deezer, Bandcamp and Amazon Music.
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Songs for the Struggling Artist 