A lady with one of those “re-sell yard sale crap” on eBay businesses listed an original NES with five games earlier this month. As it happens, one of those five games was a copy of Stadium Events. Just kind of a golden ticket type thing. The Nintendo collectible gaming community, apparently with saved eBay search notifications set to “stadium events nes”, found out about it quickly. A forum, on NintendoAge.com, pointed the ad out. A few people there posted about how they offered her side-deals for a couple hundred dollars on the game (which she was selling as part of a lot for $9.99), but mostly the forum is full of people looking out for her, inviting her to learn more, and warning her not to let anyone low-ball her. Around page 3 of the post, the seller – a grandmother – turns up, and the forum gets really protective and helpful.

It’s nice, really. I mean, everyone getting excited about the fact that it’s happening, and all of these fanatics who would gladly pay thousands and thousands of dollars for an old video game working with this lady to make sure she gets a fair deal. Not important, in any sense of the word, but just neat to see a bunch of random Internet people put away greed and opt for a bit of kindness. Presumably they were also interested in learning exactly what the game is worth these days, but curiosity and kindness are often intertwined, so it’s cool.

Incidentally, the game sold for a little over $13,000.

Anyway, Eddie spent a lot of his time going to concerts – he’d drive to San Antonio or Houston or Austin, whatever it took, to see Queensrÿche on their latest tour. The guy loved Queensrÿche. And man, was he stoked when Sammy Hagar came to the Valley for a show. He had strong opinions about the latest Dream Theater record, too.

It wasn’t that Eddie ignored all new music, he just wasn’t really interested in new music that wasn’t made by people whose records came out when he was younger. A new Queensrÿche record? Eddie was first in line, listened to it a dozen times the first weekend he had it, really gave a shit about it.

I’m turning thirty this year, and I’m afraid of becoming Eddie. I’ve only heard a handful of 2010 records so far, and all of ‘em are by musicians whose records I was listening to, like, ten years ago. They’re pretty good and all – the new Retribution Gospel Choir album’s real strong, and the Eels record is kind of a bummer, but in a nice way. I love that Lil Wayne rock record too, without a lick of irony (though apparently I’m in the minority there), and I’m just about to check out the new Massive Attack, which looks promising.

And I could have written pretty much that same paragraph back when I worked with Eddie.

So, um, help? Give me new music. Give me things with 2010 release dates, preferably made by people who were too young to ever be on Friendster – maybe even on MySpace. Because here’s a thing – unless you’re Tom Waits, your sixteenth album is not going to be anywhere near as good as your third. I want music that’s not just new to me, but new. I want to figure out what 2010 sounds like.

It’s not. But he does manage to make a comparison to the NFL again – as he did in the previous bit – that’s supposed to be convincing, but which is actually totally fucking clueless about the subject on which he speaks.

This time out, he compares the NFL’s helmet policy to health care, insisting that, since players in the NFL get the best helmets in the world, they’re reckless when playing and thus get more concussions. In Australia, meanwhile, they don’t wear helmets, and are therefore cautious, meaning they suffer 25% fewer concussions – and uninsured Americans are just like Australian footballers, being super cautious not to do anything that can get them sick.

While that’s absolutely absurd on its face, it gets dumber when you notice two important details.

1. There are twice as many teams in the NFL as in the Australian Football League, nearly a thousand more players, and the season involves 80 more games.

2. American football and Australian football are two totally different games that just have the same name. This would be like insisting that American poker, where you sit around a table and play cards, is safer than Australian poker, which I just made up, and in which players bash each other in their helmeted heads with fireplace pokers, because Americans are naturally more cautious when engaging in sport. The reason there are fewer head injuries in Australian football is because giant men aren’t running into each other from dozens of yards away at full speed. They don’t do that because the games are totally different and one of them is naturally less likely to cause head injuries.

So, yeah. It’s not exactly news that Glenn Beck is a fucking idiot, but it makes me feel better, sometimes, to point it out.

But that 60th vote isn’t something Lieberman has because he was, like, the 60th Senator voted into office or something. It’s because the 58 Democrats in power, along with Bernie Sanders, are taken for granted as voting yes, no matter what. So Rahm Emmanuel says things like, “Just give him what he wants” about Lieberman when meeting with the Senate leaders, because they want this thing passed by Christmas. And then they insist, like Jay Rockefeller did today, that “you don’t get everything you want”.

But, um, it looks like Joe Lieberman gets everything he wants. So what’s stopping, say, Bernie Sanders, or Russ Feingold, or Al Franken, or one of the other of a handful of Senators who seems to find this bill as wretched as those on my side of the civil war do, from saying, “Check me out – I’m the 60th vote now, we do it my way or I’m going to filibuster, too.”

(It’s a rhetorical question*, in case you were going to reply. And the answer isn’t “Bernie Sanders is a sell-out”.)

*”Nothin’ retardical about it.”

There’s been a bit of news that I suppose I ought to report (though if you follow me on twitter or google reader or wherever, you’ve probably figured it out)–anyway, I received an email from my editor at Austinist about six weeks ago asking me if I wanted to “step up my relationship” with the site. Which isn’t as sexy as it sounds – I was offered, and accepted, the position of theatre editor. Which has been an interesting, and fun, experience. I’ve come to understand more about what my editors do every day, and I care a lot about the theatre community in Austin, so I’m enjoying the expanded platform. I may even run some positive reviews at some point. I really, really want to.

I also started freelancing with AOL’s men’s-interest site Asylum.com, which has been a fucking blast. Basically, anytime now I see, hear, or read something that sounds vaguely weird or fucked up, I can call up a person involved, or a person who’s likely to know a lot about it, and then write it down and get paid. For instance: An atheist who promises that he’ll rescue your pets after you get raptured away if you pay him $130 right now? Or maybe a classics professor who can tell me about A-Rod’s centaur fetish? It’s been a whole bunch of fun, and I’ve only been at it for about two months, so I’m guessing it’ll get to be more so in the future.

Also still with the A.V. Club, doing arts and entertainment writing for the Austin edition and the same, plus a bunch of stuff about football, for the Chicago branch. And contributing a couple pieces a month to MadeLoud.com, which is a neat music site that some folks I know are operating. And working on the blog for Sumpter & Gonzalez, too. All of which is to say that I am really fucking busy, but pretty happy about it. 

So how’re you? We never talk anymore.

The government only mandates that you have car insurance if you choose to drive. It’s not the same thing. If you can’t afford to keep up with car insurance, you can choose not to drive and keep your expenses low.

I really like John Aravosis over at AmericaBlog.com (if you find yourself here after following a trackback, dude, sorry) but that post linked up there, and its defense in the comments section, is flat-out wrong. The logic behind it is crappy. Saying, “you already spend money on optional things like CDs, and that’s not a tax” is totally beside the point. If there were a law in place that could see me fined for not buying enough CDs, then the two would be comparable. That law’s not in place, because it’d be fucking stupid. Just like the analogy. Which is why it’s not one I’ve ever heard before, probably.

But the thing about car insurance that keeps getting brought up is just infuriating. Because it’s from such a privileged position – from people who’ve apparently never had to consider whether or not they could afford to keep a car.

For many years, I didn’t have a car. Not because I couldn’t afford to buy one – I spent most of my late teens and early twenties chewing up and spitting out $300 junkers – but because the ancillary costs, like insurance and gas and fuzzy dice and spinning rims and stuff were too much of an investment.

And I was a privileged white kid with no dependents, and my poverty was a choice that I made because I wanted to pursue opportunities that I knew wouldn’t make me any money. There are people who are really, really poor, without the option of just throwing in the towel and getting a job that would pay their bills, like I had. And those people sometimes can’t afford to drive because they can’t afford car insurance, too.

And so telling them that they have to buy health insurance now or they’re going to be fined, but it’s cool, because it’s just like how they already have to buy car insurance for the car that they don’t have, is not particularly convincing. The stats people keep spouting about how it’s an insignificant amount of money – about how the Baucus plan only requires people who live at the federal poverty line to spend 3% of their total income, which is like $300 a year, on insurance, so who gives a shit because it’s only like an extra $25 a month, and all the poor people can just have two fewer glasses at the wine bar on Friday nights, is so fucking clueless that Marie Antoinette hears them say it and is like, “dudes, time to check your privilege before you say some really dumb shit.”

(Not that it matters too much now, but this post contains some spoilers for the final performances of No One Else Will Ever Love You.)

Here are seven things I’ve learned since stepping into the director’s role at the beginning of this project:

1. As a journalist, especially an arts writer, it’s easy to forget the difference between working constantly on a zillion small projects and working for a sustained period on a single large one. It’s not that one is inherently more satisfying than the other – though I’d be lying if I said that I didn’t enjoy the sustained charge of writing a book or directing a play – but it’s a privileged position, to be writing about. It takes me, on average, 3-4 hours to review a play. An hour or two to watch it, maybe another hour to talk about it with Kat or whoever my +1 was, and to roll it around in my head, and then an hour to type it. With that inherent imbalance in the time commitment in criticism as compared to creating even a very modest work –whether it’s theater reviewing or mp3 blogging or literary criticism – it’s really vital to never be lazy when crafting a response to the piece. It’s okay to hate the piece. It’s okay to call out a loathsome piece of art as being awful. But it’s not okay to do so lazily, because you’re up against a deadline, or because you’re tired, or because you were in a bad mood when you saw it. Snark has no place in criticism – which is a shame, because it’s easy and fun, and the common idiom of the Internet. But it’s only fair in an even exchange. A three minute song takes more time to write than it does to listen to and review, so it’s not fair to be dismissive of it. That imbalance is only magnified when you move onto theater, or film, or – for fuck’s sake – books. You don’t have to be nice, but if you can’t be thoughtful about why something sucks, you probably haven’t got much of a place at the conversation.

2. This cast is genuinely incredible. I know that’s something everyone is supposed to say about every group of people ever assembled for any project ever, but speaking with critical objectivity*, it’s true: They’ve taught me some of how to do this job, and they’ve done it with grace and humor and through the hard work of indulging my bad ideas, reacting to my good ones, and helping me learn to identify the difference. I couldn’t have asked for a group that was more willing to explore the script with me, and by extension, teach me how big a part of the director’s job that is.

3. My wife is a remarkable writer. No, seriously. I spent a lot of time with her in the writing process of this script – she started it years ago, and it’s been through a number of iterations. And, as she finally narrowed in on a final draft at the beginning of the summer, I spent a lot of time talking through the structure with her, just like she helped me talk through the second half of In The Time In Between. Since I was so intimately involved in the writing process, I assumed that I knew every trick of the script, and that my initial understanding of each line was all there was to it. But there are no throwaway lines here. Pieces of dialogue that I thought were insignificant are actually subtle bombs she planted to explode the characters’ self-perception, and every moment in the working process that led us to discover a "he’s the one who sent us on our honeymoon" or "We’ve been engaged two weeks, okay?" has been a new chance to be impressed with how effortlessly talented she is at crafting characters and telling a story through dialogue. I’m humbled by her talent.

4. A year of dealing constantly with editors has made me way less sensitive that I thought I’d be, especially as it relates to bad reviews. We received four reviews for No One Else Will Ever Love You. One was very short and more Yelp-y, and it doesn’t really require much thought. Two of the others said mostly the same things, though one liked the fact that the characters had little backstory available and one thought it was a weakness of the script, and the last one gave that shit the finger. I generally feel pretty good about all four reviews, and took none of them personally. Which is a nice feeling, given that putting yourself out there is the point of doing these things. It’s better to respond to that well.

5.My favorite things about the performances:

• Bastion Carboni has a mostly unlikeable character as Charlie. He’s petulant and argumentative and self-obsessed, and there’s a part of the script that was written to display his deep insecurity. He re-enters the scene having just been out for a cigarette with Karina’s character, Jen, whom he loathes, and as it’s written he comes back a nervous wreck, agreeing to let Jen take over the wedding because he’s scared that if he doesn’t, he won’t know how to do it and it’ll never happen. Bastion completely flipped that interpretation on its head, and instead comes back from having talked to her about it positively giddy with the fact that they’ve announced their wedding to his fiancee, Nora’s, friends. What I’d have played as another chance to show what a loser this guy is, Bastion played as a moment to show him as genuine and human.
• Karina Dominguez really inhabited Jen, and the physicality that she brings to the role is so much fun to watch every night. Rather than seek an alternate interpretation for the character, she embraced her fully. There’s a moment near the end when she’s asking to be put to bed, and she holds her hands out, expecting to be picked up, and it’s the most subtle and emasculating thing she does, setting up beautifully the scene that follows it, which she’s not even in. She’s an actor who works for the other characters in the script, and it’s something that makes her a huge asset to have on stage.
• Spencer Driggers completely exceeded my expectations for what Rick, the yuppie asshole, could be. Because on the page, again, he’s just a yuppie asshole, and even when he’s annoyed or frustrated, he’s still easy to see as being always in control. When Kat and I were first talking about this play, she had offered the part of Rick to a friend of hers whom she had been in another show with. When I agreed to direct it, I made the tough decision to rule him out and go after Spencer, because I was really confident that he’d bring a lot of humanity to Rick that it would be so easy to lose. There’s a moment at the end where Rick’s emotionally vulnerable for the first time, as Nora’s yelling at him, and he yells back, and it says something about their relationship that was never on the page (and which wouldn’t work on the page) - it says this is hard for him too. And that moment, when you can empathize with that guy, is the reason I think this play works as more than just awful people doing awful things to one another.
• Jennymarie Jemison, as the lead and clear protagonist, had the toughest role, as she’s playing a character who’s largely absent in the script. All of the actors had a few key defining characteristics that were clear from their first appearance on the page to work from, and Jenny’s character is defined by her tendency to shrink, which is difficult to perform while still maintaining the role of the protagonist. I think she could play every role in everything. If I got a press release tomorrow from someone who announced that they were doing a production of Twelve Angry Men as a one-person solo show, and Jenny were playing every part, I’d be like, that’s a fucking good idea. She takes a part that could have easily been played as a shrinking violet and turns her into a reflection of what’s going on with the characters around her. You can follow the entire through-line of the play by watching her eyes. Every actor pushed both him- or herself - and me - to look beyond the obvious, surface interpretation of these people as airheads, or assholes, or pretentious goofballs, and turn them into living people whose choices, while sometimes inexcusable, are nonetheless understandable. Jenny’s character had no surface interpretation - she was given very little definition as a choice made by the script, and the way that she turned her into a real person, confined by the fact that she’s been unable to define herself, is what makes the entire play work for me.

6. Theater really is a unique and powerful artform. I knew that. I mean, I’d seen work that resonated with me in really powerful ways before. But I don’t think I totally understood the visceral impact of doing it live in front of you until I had a hand in it, and saw why things work in this setting that might not work otherwise. That’s something I owe to the more negative reviews that we got, too - things that don’t always work on an intellectual level succeed on a visceral one, and having the ability to tap into that, to make people uncomfortable as they’re watching a woman get slapped in the face by a man five feet away, to have a screaming fight go on right in front of you, that’s something that isn’t duplicated by any other medium. I know that all y’all who actually studied this shit have read all the theory about this, but learning it firsthand, learning that it doesn’t matter so much how you intellectualize an experience that can hit you hard in the moment, and learning that it’s unique to this one medium - it’s a really exciting thing to understand fully. I’ve always loved live performance, but I’m getting an even firmer grasp now on why.

7. I’ve been a solo act for almost my entire creative/artistic life. As a performer, I’ve limited myself to the one man show. As a writer, I’ve embraced non-collaborative forms almost exclusively, whether it’s as a novelist or a poet or a journalist. I’ve never really had the opportunity to collaborate on a project like this before, and I’ve been a full-time creative-person for many years now. It’s an entirely different kind of rewarding to be part of something that’s bigger than the sum of its parts, and I’m delighted that I’ve been able to share this experience with the people that I have. I genuinely have no idea if I want to do this again - at the end of the rehearsal process, I was pretty sure that I did, because it’s such a thrill to work collaboratively and explore telling a story with such insightful and fun people. As distance has passed between then and now, though, I’m exhausted, and inviting that exhaustion in again is a little bit daunting. Whether this was a diversion or a thing I’ll pursue, though, it’s going to inform so much of what I do going forward. I’m really glad that I had the chance to do it.

And that’s a lot of lessons to take from any experience. It’s funny - this was never anywhere close to on my radar. When I told my friends that I was doing it, they were mostly like, uh… a play? It’s like I told them that I had decided to become a race car driver or a high school football coach or something. I mean, I like theater, and cars, and football - but this is a level of commitment to it that I didn’t expect to make. And regardless of everything else, it’s good to find that there are whole new things that you can try. That high school football team better look out.

*Kidding, there’s no such thing.

Also: 100 minutes until call time. Still need a run to the supermarket and CopyMax.

Also, also: I take a rare trip to the other side of the voice recorder in an interview conducted by Bastion Carboni for Austinist.

My professional life is divided into two segments – I work three days a week for a law firm in Austin running their blog, working on case summaries, and occasional other writing projects. I also have a freelance writing career that, while only about nine months old, has been lucky enough to proceed steadily in that time, with work in both local and national, print and online publications and almost never having to write about anything I think is boring. I can write about Austin theater, interview my favorite musicians, get paid to offer up my thoughts on football(!), turn my obsession with reading pretty much every ad on Craigslist into a weekly gig, or just make fun of things, and I somehow have a platform. Especially given that I’m still in my rookie year as a professional freelance writer, I’ve been incredibly fortunate.

But the money can be kind of tight. That’s especially true when your wife is focused intently on starting a non-profit and needs time off for things like pilot programs and building a network of future fundraisers. And during a recession, when everyone’s telling you that the industry is dying – yeah.

So when I saw a Craigslist ad a couple weeks ago for a locally-based sneaker culture website that sought a writer for a steady paycheck, I figured I might as well apply. The site’s owned by Complex, which is a kind of icky street-culture-for-white-kids men’s magazine, so it seemed like a decent career move, and I figured I could just work myself to death for a while at two jobs, let some of my freelance work take a backseat if necessary, and learn a whole bunch about shoes. I sent them a cover letter as requested, explaining my background with sneakers, street culture, and writing. It included some of the following statements:

• I’m still learning
• I’m not trying to be an expert
• I’m a journalist, not a skater or a basketball player
• There are dudes out there who know more about sneakers than I do

The application featured a photograph of a shoe, stripped of context, and asked for a writing sample about the piece of ridiculous footwear. I did about ten minutes worth of research, identified it as the Nike OriginalFake AirMax 90, and wrote a 150 word blog-style entry in the tone of the site about it.

This was enough to qualify me for an interview. We worked out the details, and one Wednesday morning, I made the drive out to Lakeway, Texas, a suburb about 40 minutes outside of Austin, to a drab office park out of which the sneaker website was based. I met Angela Hemphill, the woman with whom I’d been corresponding in regard to the interview, and she introduced me to the person with whom I’d be speaking, whose last name was also Hemphill.

I sat down, and he stood up. He asked his first question.

“So, the most important thing I need to know is how long have you been into sneakers?”

I kind of hemmed and hawed, since I had answered that question in the “preinterview” form I’d been sent with a resounding, “Not very long”. I think I said something like, “Uh, not very long.” He frowned.

“Well, for this job, we really want someone who’s been into sneakers for at least nine years.” This caught my ear, because – fuck, nine years? Eight’s not enough, apparently, but ten would just be gratuitous. He went on. “I worked in a shoe store for nine years before I started with the site.” Which explained why ten years wasn’t necessary – he’d be unqualified for his own job, apparently. “The most important thing is that we get someone who’s really into sneakers. Most of our writers are even more obsessed with sneakers than I am. We call ourselves Sneaker-Heads, because we love them that much.”

I tried to stammer something about didn’t you or your wife or sister or whoever that person sitting over there who has the same last name that you do actually read my fucking cover letter, but I was cut off.

“Look at that table over there,” he instructed, gesturing to a table to my left that was covered in various sneakers. “How many of those can you tell me the designer of?”

I blinked. “None of them!” I blurted. He shook his head.

“Yeah, I don’t think this is gonna work out.” I started to get up, but he motioned to stay seated, apparently determined to waste a little bit more of my time. “What other subcultures are you into?”

I named a few – comics, hip-hop, that I had friends who were really into limited-run toys, street art… He nodded.

“Do you know KAWS?” I said that I did. “What about [some other street artist]?” I said no. He then proceeded to rattle off name after name. “What about [jackass street artist who designs shoes]? What about [other dumb artist who I’ve decided without seeing his work probably sucks]?” I said no to each of them, until the last one, when I said, “Yeah, I know him,” just to change things up a little, because it’s actually less rewarding than you might think to have some asshole who called you in for a job interview for no fucking reason try to embarrass you for not knowing as much about a subculture that you told him you didn’t know that much about as he does.

I was done at that point, but he decided we should end the interview on a high note. “Well, I don’t know. We really want someone who’s obsessed with sneakers,” he said, “But we might decide to go another direction.” I laughed in his face and told him to save it.

I have no idea why on earth I was called for an interview. In fact, I emailed Ms. Hemphill afterward to ask what part of my cover letter made me sound like a good fit for a job in which the first interview question asked would be, “How long have you been into sneakers,” and any answer with a number lower than nine would be met with a scowl of disapproval. I asked a lot of questions in that email. There was no response.

But the thing that drove me fucking crazy about it is that these people seem to actually believe that it’s easier to get some dude from the shoe store and teach him how to write than it is to take a professional writer and let him read a few press releases about shoes to learn the form and the industry. I mean, I’m not saying that I’m the most versatile writer to ever walk the earth, but I’ve learned enough about improvised performance art to cover that, Austin civil engineering history to write about that, and local mayoral politics to do pieces about that. Did these people really think that it took nine years of shoe-worship to turn out scintillating 150-word blog entries with content like:

The Nike Air Max Lebron VII is receiving crazy coverage and rightfully so if you witness Nike’s marketing tactics such as the LeBron VII Artist Series. Thanks to the omnipresent eyes at Daily Drop, we have notice that the LeBron VII is now available, pre-release, in its White/Black/Red colorway. Of course there is an above retail surcharge but that’s the price to pay if you care to be flyer than the rest of them.

And it’s cool. I didn’t really want to write about shoes, and I’m sure that in three months, when they lay off the dude that they eventually hired because who the fuck can afford to pay a salary to a guy who writes about shoes for some website all day, I’ll be especially glad it didn’t work out. And they’re welcome to hire based on any criteria they like, so the fact that they wanted a shoes guy is cool, I guess. But what the fuck, dudes? Why call me when your main goal is to get  guy who self-applies a label like Sneaker-Head to himself to hang out in your office with you?