Perennial Fringe Shows
The Fringe is half over. So far, I’ve seen 8 shows in 7 days–not bad, huh?
I love the Fringe dearly, and what I love most about it is the sheer diversity of material you see during the festival–stuff that you’d never see anywhere else–but like anything else, it falls into its little patterns. This is my fourth year volunteering at the Fringe, and I’ve started to notice that some show types pop up over and over again. So here it is, my list of Shows you’ll see at every New York Fringe Festival:
The one-person autobiographical show “exploring my identity as a handful of adjectives”. There are always a few of these, with only the adjectives changing–”exploring my identity as a gay Norwegian-American” or “as a Vietnamese Catholic” or whatever. I’m not a big fan of these things. On an artistic level, they’re horribly self-indulgent. On a philosophical level, the underlying assumption behind all of these things is that your identity consists of a small handful of adjectives, most of them things that you’re born with, and once you “understand what it means to be” the various adjectives, that’s your identity in a neat little bow, and I fundamentally reject that premise. It’s old-fashioned tribalism, and I’m an individualist. (Okay, my views on tribalism are a bit more nuanced than that makes them sound, but that’s a topic for another post.)
The one-person autobiographical show about “my struggle with” alcohol, depression, cancer, overeating or whatever. These things are just as self-indulgent as the first sort, but I don’t have any particular philosophical objections to them, and hey, maybe they’ll actually help somebody.
The musical set behind the scenes at a theater putting on a musical. Last year’s was also a murder mystery, and actually a lot of fun. This year’s seems to be doing very well–I was volunteering there, and it sold out–but I haven’t seen it yet myself, so I can’t comment.
The updated version of a Shakespeare play. This year there are two (seriously) Hamlet variants and a Winter’s Tale musical (which was actually quite good).
Related to that, The retelling of a classic piece of literature, or a Greek myth, focusing on one of the female characters. Seems like kind of an obscure thing, but they keep popping up.
The show inspired by a hot trend, but thanks to Festival lead times, it’s rather out of date by the time you actually see it. Last year there were a couple of reality show parodies, this year it’s MySpace.
Oh, and let’s not forget The preachy show banging on this year’s hot-button left-wing cause du jour. There are always a couple of those. Last year it was the Iraq war, this year it’s Global Warming.
I don’t want to make it sound like the Fringe is incredibly repetitive. There are about 200 shows a year, so naturally there’s a certain amount of overlap. And there’s lots of crazy original stuff every year too. But man, I’ve sat through enough of the above shows by now, I really have.
NYC, Theater | Comment (0)Fringe Report: Warrior Clowns
This is the second Fringe Festival in a row where I’ve seen a one-person clown show in which the clown plays a person with a mundane life who escapes from that life with dreams of being a much-mythologized historical warrior. You wouldn’t think that would be a particularly common type of show, would you? Last year, it was Musashi, this year, Joan of Arc.
And no, it wasn’t the same clown, and I doubt very much the two shows were connected in any way, considering that the two performers were from different continents.
NYC, Theater | Comment (0)Link: Asimov on Science Being Wrong
I know, this blog has turned into nothing but a list of “interesting links” in the past couple of days, but here’s another good one. There’s an attitude among a certain segment of the population that, since science is constantly discovering new things, we could be wrong about everything we think we know–we could discover something totally new tomorrow that means we were wrong about everything we thought we knew. Here’s an essay by Asimov arguing against that idea, using the shape of the earth to demonstrate how science works by a process of gradual refinement. Good stuff.
Links | Comment (0)Link: Treadmill
We’re one step closer to Star Trek’s holodeck with this omni-directional treadmill. Now all we need is “hard light” holograms…scientists, get cracking on that.
Geek, Links | Comment (0)Link: Food Miles and Carbon
Interesting NYTimes article debunking the assumption that local food is necessarily better for the environment than imported food. British people, for instance, have a lower carbon footprint buying New Zealand lamb than buying local lamb, in part because New Zealand lambs can graze, while British lambs have to eat feed that took carbon emissions to produce. The writer’s vision of the future, which approaches a centralized command economy for food, disturbs me somewhat, but the findings are very interesting.
Food, Links | Comment (0)Griping about Companies
Oh, and incidentally, at work recently we saw a presentation by a company that “data mines” blog posts for companies. Their software crawls blogs for the latest on what people are saying about a company, and then people label the posts as positive or negative, group them by category (which is company-specific, so Northwest could well have a “stupid extra charges” category if enough people are talking about that), and pull out key quotes to show what bloggers think.
So if you gripe about a company on your blog, your gripes may very well reach the ears of the company. But you have to make sure you use the company’s name if you want them to have a chance of seeing it.
Meta | Comment (0)Back
I’m back! I expect I’ll get around to posting some Club Mich stories sooner or later.
Meanwhile, can I just say that wow, Northwest Airlines sucks these days? When I was going to school in Minnesota, I used to fly Northwest a lot, and I don’t remember it being nearly as bad as this trip. They have a “nickel and dime you to death” attitude that puts other airlines to shame. They charge extra for:
- Any food at all on the plane, even a pack of potato chips
- Changing to an earlier flight in the same day, if you arrive at the airport early
- (And this one just boggles my mind) Sitting in an exit row seat. Seriously. An extra $15 if you want to sit in an exit row seat.
Additionally, Northwest’s self-check-in system is the worst I’ve ever used. In both airports, but particularly in the Grand Rapids airport, it was completely disorganized. In Grand Rapids, the self-check-in kiosks were right where you check your luggage/talk to a representative, so when people were waiting to check their luggage or talk to a representative, they were standing in front of the kiosks, blocking other people from using them. What were the people who designed this system thinking?
So yeah, not a fan of Northwest right now.
Rant, Travel | Comment (0)