Maybe it’s just that as a new northwesterner, I’m used to stores that sell lots of stuff. Costco is from the Seattle area. In contrast, New York has little corner shops that do nothing but eyebrow plucking. Or sell kitchen sinks.
And so it was weird to pass by some shops on the train:
* Mr. Bar Stool
* Gray Iron Castings.
Gray Iron Castings? Do they turn you away if you want black or silver iron castings?
Wow.
(This is a meditation on gentrification, locked deep in the review of a play that you probably won't see. But you really should, if you can. It's smart, it's funny.)
Last night, I was in the Lower East Side, seeing “There Goes the Neighborhood” at PS 122. (Full disclaimer: while PS 122 stages great stuff, I don’t usually fly in from Seattle for it. But when a childhood friend writes the play, I do.) I was still adjusting to New York: I’d gotten off my plane, zipped about by train, and was just about in place. I’d almost gotten used to streets flowing with taxis and busses, subways running everywhere, and cafes, restaurants, and kitchen-supply stores on each corner.
But I hadn’t heard a Brooklyn-Italian accent for a while, so when Deanna Pacelli stepped on stage as Vinnie, a tough salami-slicer, it took me a few words before I was quite adapted. When I caught up with him, Vinnie was talking about his shop (which sells the best mozzarella in Brooklyn, and possibly the world) which he’d inherited from his father. Which he had inherited, in turn, from his father.
Vinne isn't as happy with the way his street is today.
Deanna's accent quickly changed: a glass of wine, and she was a bar owner who had moved in from Long Island. A flick of her hair, a shawl in her lap, and a she was a Puerto Rican immigrant. A broke worker who had moved in looking for cheaper housing. An Italian grandmother, a gay town improvement activist. A retired librarian.
Each of them had a piece of a story to tell about Smith Street, a recently-gentrified neighborhood in Brooklyn. Mari Brown, the forementioned childhood friend, had settled on Smith Street in 2000, and had taken a job as a waitress. She started getting to know the regulars at the local bar, and—not long after starting—began to collect their stories.
Everyone had something to say about how the street became the way it was: the changes that had happened since it was a bustling Italian neighborhood in the 50s and 60s, and how it had been named as “trendiest restaurant row” in the 21st century. Some were proud. Some were upset. Some were worried, or nostalgic.
There are a lot of sides to gentrification, and the idea of a neighborhood. Everyone has their own favorite moment, something that makes the neighborhood work. Is it decades of tradition, as Vinnie suggests? Or is it being a good gathering place? (If so, do you gather on the stoop, in a bar, in a coffeehouse, or in a cocktail lounge with hot breakbeats?) Is it important to know your neighbors? Do you want to be protected by your tough cousins, or by the faceless police?
None of these have easy answers. They all get brought out during debates about how neighborhoods should be shaped, or reshaped.
Mari collected these stories, and wove them together into a play. Her roommate, Deanna Pacelli, is an actress, and was a fellow waitress; she brought the characters back to life on stage. The different perspectives are all raised, held up to the light, considered. None are ignored or laughed-off; even though the play is a comedy (and it is a particularly funny one, largely just because people are funny), it’s a sensitive one.
While the one-actor-plays-a-small-army has definitely Been Done, and so often tastes more than a little stale, this particular take is impressively constructed and feels fresh. Rather than a series of standalone monologues, this play gives shorter bits to the characters and ties them more closely together. The actress smoothly slides between the characters; she brings them back to chat, to argue with each other, to change their minds. Different moments in history get examined from three or four different perspectives. And a story is gradually constructed.
Upon writing this, and only now, I realize that Mari tells it like a documentary. This isn’t a bad way to construct a story: we meet a growing series of opinionated experts who each have something important to say. The storytelling forms a coherent unit, and we get a history and a direction in one.
They showed it in Brooklyn (and brought the subjects to watch) last year to general acclaim, including a New York Times review. Now they’ve moved up to Off-Off-Broadway in a limited run
that closes on May 29 (sorry about the short notice), with another Times review a few days ago.
I'll be passing through NYC briefly this Friday night to see There Goes the Neighborhood, which was written by a friend... I'll be in DC on Saturday afternoon through Wednesday afternoon.
(Wednesday through Saturday I'm at the emailviz workshop and the HCIL open house )
Just to let you know.
... they say, although they also say that home is where they have to take you in when you go there.
This weekend, I was startled to (once again) rediscover both how connected and how weirdly spread out my social networks are. It happened in a combined birthday / graduation party (congratulations, Dr. Nikita,, 14th Wearer of the Robes!) late at night in Berkeley while I was down here for the online deliberation conference.
I found out that a mailing list that I'm a member of--one that gets a number of my mass emails--has something more like a hundred members than the much more comfortable 30 or so that I'd thought. It's very strange going to a party where more people recognize me than vice versa.
Anyway, it was great to see them all, and to have a little bit to catch up. And to remember that the Bay Area isn't my home, but is definitely some sort of place that I belong.
I'm at the Online Deliberation conference at Stanford (hi Ping!), where I just presented a fun, illustrated overview of my work. Hm. I need to find a way to post some of those slides sometime, with some explanation... hopefully, I'll have a paper draft that will clarify that shortly.
Until then, I also co-wrote a paper with John Kelly, from Columbia. We kind of swapped analysis and discussion back and forth; I'm actually quite pleased with how it turned out. I had never met John before we got this paper together; I'm looking forward to continuing collaboration afterward.
I'm in the Bay Area for the Online Deliberation conference, and while I've got all sorts of important things I should be doing, I'd rather talk about a play.
See, I did a really bad job of planning this trip, but I decided to take an extra night and hit the Impact Briefs show. Impact Theater plays in the basement of LaVals, in Berkeley, which means that it's theater you can drink beer and eat pizza to. This is a very good thing for any sort of theater, but espcially theirs.
This episode is the "how to" show, and--as promised--provides a great deal of useful how-to information. How To Avoid Drowning in Two Inches of Water. How To Be Popular. How to Order a Fun Dinner in a Fun Restaurant
Thursdays through Saturdays, through May 28.
(More, below the line...)
The show rotates between three media: a funny, short plays, less than ten minutes; hilarious, narrated slide shows; and clippings from the Prelinger Archive. The plays are largely good; two of them, I think, both by Wayne Rawley, are brilliant. (Yes, Wayne just left Seattle for the Bay Area.)
"How to ask a scary question" addresses a real issue in everyone's life: he and she are sitting on a couch. He builds his strength, looks nervous--and wants to ask the question that's clearly been on his mind. What the question is, and how she answers, and what happens after that is, of course, what makes the play. And even if you haven't asked that question, you've been right there.
"How to Gain Controlling Interest" addresses the real questions in a boardroom, complete with suits and ties.
The various edits from the Prelinger Archive are marvelous, but that's mostly because I just can't get enough of 1950s social hygeine films. As a proto-sociologist, I watch them with a certain fascination: they are an intentional, explicit attempt to construct social mores. Which I think I'll have to blog about some other time soon.
Check it out.
So I finally made it out to see the Hitchhiker's Guide movie at the fabulous Cinerama, a theater that fully deserves the "rama" after its name. (Tangentially, I'm pretty sure that everything in life is better with "o-rama" after it's name.)
This review is easy on the spoilers, but will ultimately encourage you to go out and give it a shot. If you want to be completely surprised (She's a guy! Vader is Luke's father!), you probably shouldn't read this.
Anyway, I've been hearing some pretty grim stuff. "Terrible," declared my brother, and others had told me that it was an abuse of the material. A widely-circulated story accused it of having no sense of timing. But in the same way that I'll see Episode III, like it or not, because there are some bits of childhood that just have to be watched. Somehow, I heard just enough about I, Robot to miss that one. Fortunately.
Maybe my expectations were too low. Maybe I was replaying a different movie in my head. But I really liked it--which surprised me, because I'm all too often a purist about stuff. It can't possibly be the same thing as the books, or the TV show, or the radio series (all of which I, to variable extents, loved), much less the computer game (not so loved). That's partially because, well, the various series aren't consistent.
The best of the jokes recur between series. The same places are seen again and again, in various places, and the core characters are fairly consistent. But except for that, it's a fairly wild ride, and new bits come pretty much out of nowhere in the various episodes.
The movie is true to that eclectic schema. It has a new theme song (a big musical number!), a newly expanded role for Vogons, a vague love theme (yeah, it's Hollywood) and a desperate attempt to make the movie hang together in some sort of logical sequence that doesn't depend on fortuitous explosions or the deus ex machina that is the infinite improbability drive.
Speaking of which, the work with the Drive is very possibly some of the most inspired in the movie. It is, indeed, rather Improbable. And involves sock monkeys, once, and generally gives the sense that the drive works on principles of physics that are just plain weird.
The actors all get it. Marvin (voiced by Alan Rickman) is an inspired selection, as is Mos Def (as a truly brilliant Ford). Zaphod, played by Sam Rockwell, is the President of the Galaxy played as a current President of the US, and is rolling-on-the-floor funny.
In general, the look and feel of the movie is nicely crisp. It is a Major Hollywood Production, which is both good and bad, with clever things like "Set Design" and "Special Effects" (which were both largely beyond the original BBC TV production). The cleverest bit of the old BBC series was the hand-drawn "computer displays" from the Guide; the new version pays respectful homage to its retro look while taking into account the existence of the iPod, contemporary visual design, and a 90s aesthetic. Deep Thought is, I think, a giant TiVo, which was a profound decision.
That said, it's not perfect. Some parts make very little sense, even for this movie (what's with the weird John Malkovitch scene?). Periodically, the silliness seems to overwhelm even the movie, which staggers and reorients.
Obsessive fans will love the Star Wars reference, the fluid and free invocation of British TV history, and the various cameos: look for Douglas Adams' face, the original Marvin from the TV series. New fans will watch as it flies by, and will get about two-thirds of the jokes-- but will probably enjoy the whole. Lord of the Rings it isn't--we won't see entire airplanes filled with giggling Hitchhiker's readers--but it's a good shot for what it is.
Oh, and stick around through the credits.
--
This movie has been rated with 3.5 stars on the Classic Hitchhiker's Quote List Scale:
1* And me, with a pain in all the diodes down my left side ..
2* Hey, is this guy boring you? I'm from another planet!
3* In those days spirits were brave, the stakes were high, men were real men and women were real women and small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri were real small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri.
4* Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.