I'm in Logan airport between flights, making the most of the wi-fi. First thing I see: the latest Zogby showing an electoral vote tie, with Pennsylvania holding the balance (because it has more votes than Virginia).
Readers of this blog do not need to be told to vote. (So go call all your friends and relations in PA.)
Jack Balkin's inimitable take on the real swing voters.
We've been having some substantial work done on our house, which means that between periods of frustrating inactivity it is overrun by armies of sub-contracted workers. Last week it was painters.
The sign gets a reaction from these transient visitors. By and large the sub-contracting bosses are not very pro-Kerry, although at least around us they profess to not be very pro-Bush either. And our general contractor says he may vote for Nader, or may stay home. At first I thought he was saying that to tease us, now I think he means it.
Several of the workers' cars have Kerry stickers.
The head painter, I'll call him 'Ernesto', mentioned in imperfect English that he'd seen our Kerry-Edwards sign. Ernesto told us with quiet pride that this was going to be his first chance to vote here since immigrating from Honduras.
His first US vote ever would be cast for Kerry, Ernesto said. 'Bush has not been good,' he explained.
A few days later, Ernesto waved a bunch of Kerry-Edwards signs from the back of his truck: all his friends are getting them.
The Guardian has a two-part series online called The road to Abu Ghraib. It's sufficiently weird that it reads like gonzo fiction, but we are asked to believe it.
Did a Major General really decide that psychic powers would let him walk through walls, and psychic healing could save troops wounded without access to ordinary medical care? And even if so, is this really connected to Abu Ghraib?
It's interesting, though, to read about the mythical First Earth Battalion and how the ideas behind it might have seeped into reality.
It's been slim pickings at TKTS, maybe because I've been showing up too early. Show up at or before 10am opening you don't have to wait very long, but there's less choice I suspect than if I showed up at noon and queued a long time. I would have loved to see the new David Hare play, but it's not on while I'm in town.
So last night I saw Jerry Springer: the Opera. I am more of straight theater kind of guy, but I'd read about this and, well, I guess I'm glad I saw it. I've only ever seen about five minutes of Springer in some hotel somewhere, and I was fairly disgusted. The show is pretty smart about walking a line between joining in with Springer and condemning him. It revels in his horribleness while at the same time inviting you to revel too while at the same time marking an ironic distance. That's clever. And uncomfortable. It's a somewhat well, not raunchy but defiantly rude show. And it's a real spectacle. The use of the audience as a modern trailer-trash manipulated Greek chorus is clever.
Jerry gets sent to visit hell, but the permanence of his stay is left ambiguous.
I left wondering what on earth Springer himself thought of it.
Apparently he liked it
“I 'm honored to the point that I realize that I'm the only human being on the planet earth that's an opera,” Springer says. “There have been others, but they're dead.”
This evening I saw an RSC production of “Twelfth Night” set in an Indian milieu. It did the play no harm, allowed the addition of nice costumes and some good physical jokes, and thus distracted a little from the play's utter implausibility. Orisnio was a drip who mostly didn't speak loud enough. Viola played the role very straight, which mostly was not too good except in her scenes with Olivia, who was generally magnificent…topped only by the Fool who kept stealing the show. On the whole a good production of one of Shakespear's weakest plays, but not in the same class as the History Boys, or the RSC production of Coriolanus I saw the last time I was in London, which I'm sure is the best Coriolanus I'll ever see in my life.
Tomorrow it's back to the National for “A Funny Thing Happened”.
Blogging may be sparse until I get back to the US late on Tuesday. Or, if we go on campus to watch the election returns with the students, maybe not till Wednesday…
Over at Mirror of Justice the participants are having a fascinating and largely civil debate over what a Catholc conscience does or doesn't demand when casting a ballot. One of the things I like best about the Internet is being allowed to share in foreign (as in 'very different from my' not as in 'from other countries' although that's very good too) viewpoints — so I love this stuff.
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