Friday Concert Clip/Theatre Discussion

For those who noticed that the song "Jet Airliner" appeared as Tuesday's post title, but that I listed "Paul Pena" in the tags rather than the Steve Miller Band, well...I actually doubt anyone noticed, and that is a shame. Paul Pena was, until his recent death, one of the most unique musicians in the world, and I say that without any sense of exaggeration. Blind since birth, he became famous for writing "Jet Airliner" and any number of other songs (apparently, some people have covered "Gonna Move" on American Idol). Blind blues musicians, however, are something of a famous subcategory, so that could hardly be called unique. No, the unique part is that after hearing Tuvan throatsinging on a shortwave radio, he taught himself to sing that way without any formal training. The result can be seen in this clip. Wait for the 1:23 and 1:53 marks for the reason his nickname is "Earthquake". The story of his journey to Central Asia was captured in the documentary film Genghis Blues, and the film's soundtrack is mindblowing. The most impressive song on the album, and perhaps the most original blues song I've ever heard, is the song that won an award at the throatsinging competition featured int he movie, "Kargyraa Moan", and it can be found at this blog. Stop what you are doing and go listen to it. I can wait, and you'll be a better person for it. Seriously, click the link now.

Tonight, my wife and I went to the local community college for an evening of locally written one-act plays. In many places, this would be painful, but we happen to be in a college town with several active theatre departments and theatre companies, so the quality was surprisingly good. While not perfect, it's still a neat experience to catch local theatre, especially since you never know quite what you'll get, unlike just about every Hollywood movie out there. She was surprised to find that we both liked the two dramas more than the one comedy, but we figured out that this makes a lot of sense. Writing plays must be an immensely difficult task. For one thing, the length works against you; a good short story is often harder to achieve than a good novel, since you have less room with which to work. In some inadequate amount of time, you have to introduce characters, invest the audience's sympathies or distaste into them, and then make up enough plot to keep people interested but still allow for some kind of catharsis or conclusion. That's a big task for a 15-page short story (or even an 80-page novella), and is even harder to put on stage, where the dialogue has to carry the action rather than the descriptive passages. In these settings, comedy is especially tough. Comedy generally works if it's very smart or very dumb, but can fall very flat anywhere in between. The dumb stuff works well on film, but requires a great deal of physical effort from a cast, usually more than a local theatre can be expected to pull off given limited resources. Smart comedy, on the other hand, can be just as tough. Some of the jokes in tonight's one-act were pretty sharp, others a bit less edgy, so the final product was good but not great. It had potential, sure, but there are very few new jokes under the sun, and it didn't really find many. Dramas allow for a bit more leeway, since they can be funny, melodramatic, or philosophical in parts, and it just adds to their breadth. The risk always seems to be that after a good opening, it is hard to keep the level up throughout the middle, and then end strong. The first play we saw managed the former but came up short on the latter, whereas the second got a little overcooked in the middle but saved itself with a good ending.

All in all, though, it was a lot of fun. Local productions may lack the funds needed to design elaborate sets and lighting setups, but the play's the thing, not the background. So long as the people speaking the lines are competent, and many, many people in this town greatly exceed that threshold, you don't really lose out seeing something nearby instead of off-broadway, and you can save some serious dough. Of the plays we've seen, several have been very good (Copenhagen, a three-person all-dialogue drama about physicists Werner Heisenberg and Niels Bohr at the beginning of WWII, was excellent), and the ones that fell flat typically did so more from failings of the playwright than of the cast. Musicals are a bit more hit and miss, since strong singers seem to be rarer than good actors. If there were more great singers, after all, American Idol would never be able to weed down all their applicants. I do have to recommend Urinetown, which we caught at the community college last fall, to anyone who gets the chance to see it. It had to be difficult getting the backing to produce a musical about urination and the economic theories of Malthus, but they managed it, and it's becoming something of a community musical theatre favorite apparently. The best thing about local theatre may be the fact that of all the forms of popular entertainment out there, it supports the best group of people. I pretty much figure the money i spend on movies and CDs goes directly to Big Media, and even new books come out of large publishing houses. Professional sports teams are some of the most odious forces in the world when they blackmail local governments, getting tax breaks left and right that would be better spent anywhere on public services rather than modern day bread and circuses. Local theatre supports...educational institutions, the local arts and culture scene, and even the actors themselves. There is literally no down side. As for tonight, all the people who put on tonight's show can take a bow, they did some very nice work indeed.

Big ol jet airliner, don't carry me too far away, Big ol' jet airliner, 'cause it's here that I've got to stay

Having flown a great deal ever since moving to the Midwest, I think I can say with some degree of authority that the experience has gotten significantly more unpleasant since 9/11 for an obvious reason. No, not terrorism, if that was what you were thinking. Sure, security lines are occasionally a hassle, especially when airports reconfigure them and they back up, but I've still never had to wait more than an hour in line, and never came close to missing a flight. Most of the mishegas you find in a security line does nothing to actually protect your security, but it doesn't harm it either, so it's basically a wash. One tip: when lines are long, it's great to be flagged for a personal screening, since it jumps you right around the backup, for the cost of getting lightly felt up by a guard who will react extremely well to a passenger who acts politely and calls him sir.

No, the problem for the airline industry is the high cost of gasoline ever since the US used 9/11 to attack Iraq like they wanted to do long before Bush was inaugurated. This isn't mere conspiracy talk, it was the stated plan of the Project for the New American Century, from whose ranks came Richard Armitage, Jeb Bush, Dick Cheney, Zalmay Khalilzad, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Richard Perle, Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz. Their little war has caused oil prices to double since 2003 , killing the airlines' profits and allowing them to basically screw over their customers without restriction. Only Southwest and Alaska Airlines, who bought fuel futures at a ridiculously low price, managed to escape this trap and stay profitable among domestic carriers.

Remember American Airlines "More room in coach" policy...they abandoned it in 2005. During our recent trip to Seattle, a four hour flight, we were offered the opportunity to buy a vastly overpriced snack box, but saw no trace of a free snack, not even a stupid little bag of pretzels. Airlines almost seem to be going out of their way to nickel and dime you, but to be fair, it can get much, much worse.

As many of us have discovered, including some readers of this blog, the entire US Airline flight system shuts down lately the second there is a storm anywhere. My wife planned to visit family over Christmas, but the same storm that kept Alexis in Denver somehow kept a commuter flight from flying from Chicago to Champaign, even though both cities had clear skies and unseasonably warm temperatures. I remember a few years back the fun debates we had with United ticket agents at O'Hare when they tried to argue we were staying overnight in the airport because of weather delays, and we explained that it really had much more to do with their pilots refusing overtime. Thankfully, dad is a lawyer, so the Airlines ended up paying later, if i recall correctly, which is pretty much the standard result you find when dealing with a lawyer about anything.

Of course, these musings are prompted by the recent cancellation of over a quarter of Jet Blue's flights for an entire week, because of a single snowstorm that socked NYC. In the most extreme case, the nice but hopelessly incompetent people manning the airline left passengers on a plane for ten hours without food or water for everyone, and at some point the lavatories backed up. Joy. This has prompted calls for an Airline Passengers Bill of Rights. Jet Blue themselves instituted a version of this today, but suffice it to say that no one really trusts them. Airlines voluntarily committed to one of these plans back in 1999, after Northwest pulled the same trick, and look how well that's proven to work since. While actual legislation was blocked that time, it is looking increasingly possible that it may happen this time around. Democratic Senator Barbara Boxer has already started drafting a bill, designed so that passengers will never have to sit for more than three hours on the tarmac before being returned to the gate. This doesn't really happen all that often, but it's the extreme cases that demand the most serious regulation.

Of course some groups are already spreading hysteria about how this will doom the industry, as they always do:

But many people within the travel industry are opposed to such a bill. And Professor Gritta himself has mixed feelings about it – primarily because he's not sure the federal government can legislate customer service. He's also concerned that a new set of federal requirements could hamper the airline industry's still precarious financial recovery.

Others in the industry are more adamantly opposed. Kevin Mitchell, president of the Business Travel Coalition in Radnor, Pa., contends a passenger bill of rights could end up creating an entire slew of unintended consequences, such as more passenger inconvenience as well as higher prices.

For instance, one reason that airlines and pilots choose to sit on the tarmac is that if they go back to the gate, they lose their slot in the takeoff line. That could add even more hours of delay to a trip.

"Say a thunderstorm gridlocked O'Hare Airport for three hours and all planes were required to go back to the gate after three hours," says Mr. Mitchell. "It would be a catastrophe for a week [because of various FAA and crew regulations]. And so as well- intentioned as it may be, if you tie the hand of these airport managers and airlines, you're going to get more delays."

Let's take these in order, noting that they are rare occurrences. "You can't legislate customer service"...ummm, yes you can, if you happen to be Congress. It's part of the whole "Interstate Commerce" thing granted them in the Constitution. Think of it like the 40-hour work week and the minimum wage. People said they shouldn't legislate those, either.

"Hamper the recovery": How and why their costs allow them to trap you on a plane for TEN HOURS is beyond me. Since it affects all airlines equally, it's unclear why it hurts any specific airline. If some can't actually make that guarantee, than perhaps they shouldn't be flying in the first place. "unintended consequences" If these arise, then you can amend the stupid law! in the scenario described, you mandate that planes that got held up get priority over the other ones. It's just not that frickin hard. Planes don't take so long to taxi out to the runway, and we have computers that do this kind of scheduling task really, really well. Let's let them try.

In an interview on NPR today, Senator Boxer made a very good point. Since 9/11, airline passengers have been stripped of just about any right to complain about anything while on board a flight. Passengers have very few rights whatsoever with regard to any instruction from the crew. If the airlines refuse to implement policies to protect their interests, than it is the proper role of Congress to step in and take over. Remember, we've heard all of these arguments before. We'll take an example from the auto industry, since I think (ok, I hope) that it may prove to be prescient for the matter at hand. From Off the Kuff:

Generally speaking, the first thing you should do is disregard every gloom-and-doom statement that will emanate from an auto industry flack. These guys have bitched and moaned about every regulation imposed on them since the dawn of time. They fought against seat belts, they fought against air bags, they fought against fuel efficiency standards, and when they lost those fights they turned around and made the features they were forced to add selling points. The whole thing is a big heaping pile of FUD [ed. note: FUD = Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt], and should be taken as such. Once we're all straight on that, we can have the real debate.