Amazon’s Monopsony Is Not O.K. - NYTimes.com:
So far Amazon has not tried to exploit consumers. In fact, it has systematically kept prices low, to reinforce its dominance. What it has done, instead, is use its market power to put a squeeze on publishers, in effect driving down the prices it pays for books — hence the fight with Hachette. In economics jargon, Amazon is not, at least so far, acting like a monopolist, a dominant seller with the power to raise prices. Instead, it is acting as a monopsonist, a dominant buyer with the power to push prices down.

And on that front its power is really immense — in fact, even greater than the market share numbers indicate. Book sales depend crucially on buzz and word of mouth (which is why authors are often sent on grueling book tours); you buy a book because you’ve heard about it, because other people are reading it, because it’s a topic of conversation, because it’s made the best-seller list. And what Amazon possesses is the power to kill the buzz. It’s definitely possible, with some extra effort, to buy a book you’ve heard about even if Amazon doesn’t carry it — but if Amazon doesn’t carry that book, you’re much less likely to hear about it in the first place.

So can we trust Amazon not to abuse that power? The Hachette dispute has settled that question: no, we can’t.

It's pretty, but is theatre any longer necessary? - DC Theatre Scene:

We’ve done a parallel disservice to the theatre: we’ve allowed an ancient institution of high purpose to devolve to something merely decorative, an appurtenance of leisured life, not a preserver of life itself. Theatre no longer guides, it distracts. Theatre no longer orients, it diverts. Theatre no longer flashes out danger, it celebrates good feeling. We’ve lost any visceral sense of what theatre is for. Like the lighthouses of popular imagination it’s perceived as quaint. It’s become a tourist attraction.

At the summit discussion Peter Marks organized this spring at Arena Stage, five Artistic Directors bemoaned the lack of diversity in playwrights and directors, the lack of young people in the audience, the high cost of production, and the high cost of tickets. Their confab produced a flurry of derisive tweets blaming the bemoaners themselves for all these shortcomings.

I found myself unable to take sides on these questions because my mind couldn’t let go of a statistic somebody mentioned in passing: according to the NEA, the audience for theatre has declined by a third in ten years.While we debate how to make theatre cheaper and more inclusive, a good part of our audience is dying off or learning to live without us.

Jess Row: Native Sons - Guernica / A Magazine of Art & Politics:

When Another Country was published—at the very peak of Baldwin’s public stature as a civil rights activist—it was taken as a document of a very small slice of the present: the Greenwich Village and Paris of the late 1950s and early 1960s, where interracial couples and gay people were able to live openly, mostly but not entirely out of the omnipresent shadow of violence. But Another Country is also an intensely prophetic book, in which Baldwin glimpses a world much more like the one we inhabit today, where overt, legal racism and homophobia is inexorably falling away, and what we have to look at, instead, is the face of the person we’ve feared and misunderstood and avoided. It’s a plural world, a world of unstable pronouns, multiple identities, and overlapping narratives. Which is not to say that anyone in the book ends up happy: this is a novel, after all, that begins with one man’s leap off the George Washington Bridge and ends with a series of betrayals—profound and petty—among his survivors. It’s out of that traumatized state, Baldwin seems to say, that the most important realization occurs: our offenses, our intertwined histories and mutual obligations, are more like love affairs than legal cases—love affairs that are never really over. “It doesn’t do any good to blame the people or the time,” one of his characters says, “one is oneself all those people. We are the time.”

A reminder that next week I'm performing two nights with two different shows at Joe's Pub.

On Wednesday, July 23rd, it's OUR MAN IN HAVANA, my travel monologue about our fractured relationship with Cuba, drive-through mojito stands, and a very special seder in Havana.

TICKETS

Then the next night, July 24th, I follow with YES THIS MAN, my controversial monologue about men, women, privilege, power, and the Yaffa Cafe's carrot dressing.

TICKETS

Hope you'll join us for this doubleheader,

md


“He’s a brilliant trickster, a close-magician with superb sleight of hand. His furies are bright and stark, incandescently theatrical. His phrasings and delivery are ensorcelling and incantatory. He’s an escape artist.”
New York Magazine

“The master storyteller—one of the finest solo performers of his generation.”
The New York Times

“He embraces the insightful hostillity of the best comedy.”
The New Yorker

NYTimes today, page one, above the fold: Child Labor in the High Tech Factories in China.

Hello Internet,

Mike Daisey here. I’m a monologist, and I do new shows every month at the Public Theater’s Joe’s Pub. Two weeks ago we announced and put on sale a show titled YES ALL WOMEN, in which I planned to talk about how our world is built on the subjugation and ownership of women, and how men perpetuate that violence.

I was always aware that it’s a provocative title—I get that. I want it to be provocative, because I want to get under people’s skins. My work has often functioned that way, and I wanted to try and be a man taking responsibility for my own complicity in the way things are. I was leery of the title, but you learn in theater to be even more leery of silence and having the world ignore your work. So I pulled the trigger.

Three hours ago Twitter blew up about the show. People were outraged and furious, and as I read their responses I saw that some people were genuinely hurt. And that felt terrible—I had thought that since I never used the actual hashtag, I would be commenting on and exploring the space opened up by #yesallwomen, but I never wanted people to feel their voices were being co-opted and silenced.

It’s a straightforward irony: I’m a man, who monologues, speaking. It was a charged gamble. I should have realized that often people judge me for what they know of my work, and I am sorry for anyone who felt hurt or betrayed. I’m especially sorry for anyone who felt like this was belittling #yesallwomen, which I think is a fantastic and necessary hashtag and conversation.

So, effective immediately, I’m changing the name of the show from YES ALL WOMEN to YES THIS MAN.

I’ve chosen to call the show YES THIS MAN not just because it better reflects what I aim to discuss in the monologue, but also because it is simply a better title. I engaged with many people on Twitter throughout this, and someone who was upset with me was kind enough to suggest it. The truth is that it was always a better title, and I would have used it from the start had I been clever enough to think of it.

I’ve learned in my life that it’s a process of revision—the past few years have been all about that for me, and I’m grateful. I hope that people take this change in the spirit that it’s intended: of openness, transparency, and with the belief that everyone has stories to tell.

Best,

md

YES ALL WOMEN

Created and Performed by Mike Daisey

Joe’s Pub at the Public Theater
Wednesday, June 25th—Doors at 9

Tickets

Mike Daisey tackles what we don’t like talking about: how our world is built on the subjugation and ownership of women, and how men perpetuate that violence every day. Rejecting simple catchphrases and rote thinking, Daisey doesn’t try to speak for women—instead he interrogates his own history and choices as a way of framing a human discussion about how it could be possible to live an authentic life where we actually see one another. Gender, sex, violence, and passion mix together with dark humor as he does his best to try and tell an untellable story.

Mike Daisey, hailed as “the master storyteller” and “one of the finest solo performers of his generation” by The New York Times, is the preeminent monologist in the American theater today. He has been compared to a modern-day Mark Twain and a latter-day Orson Welles for his provocative monologues that combine the political and the personal, weaving secret histories with hilarity and heart. This fall he performed a critically acclaimed 29-night live theatrical novel, All the Faces of the Moon, onstage at the Public in Joe’s Pub.

He has performed in theaters across five continents, ranging from remote islands in the South Pacific to the Sydney Opera House to abandoned theaters in post-Communist Tajikistan. He’s been a guest on Real Time with Bill Maher, the Late Show with David Letterman, a longtime host and storyteller with The Moth, as well as a commentator and contributor to The New York Times, The Guardian, Harper’s Magazine, Newsweek, WIRED, Vanity Fair, Slate, Salon, NPR and the BBC. In a brief, meteoric career with This American Life, his shows are among the most listened to and downloaded episodes of that program’s nineteen year history.

He is currently at work on his second book, Here at the End of Empire, which will be published in 2015 by Simon and Schuster. He has been nominated for the Outer Critics Circle Award, two Drama League Awards, and is the recipient of the Bay Area Critics Circle Award, six Seattle Times Footlight Awards, the Sloan Foundation’s Galileo Prize, and a MacDowell Fellowship.

“The master storyteller—one of the finest solo performers of his generation.”
—The New York Times

“Pure magic.”
—New York Magazine

“He embraces the insightful hostility of the best comedy.”
—The New Yorker

Tickets

Hello All,

Three huge shows in three great cities this month:

First, we bring AMERICAN UTOPIAS, my monologue of Burning Man, Disney World, and the Occupy movement to San Francisco at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts for two nights only, May 16th and 17th. These are going to be huge shows, and my first return to the Bay Area in three years—hope you can join us!

Details and tickets

Second, I go to Toronto where I'll premiere DREAMING OF ROB FORD, a brand new monologue about Toronto's notorious mayor, as an environmental piece in an abandoned porno theater. That's just three nights only, May 21st to 23rd, and tickets are selling out.

Details and tickets

Finally, I'll present the very first performance of OUR MAN IN HAVANA, my new monologue about my journey to Cuba this spring and the world America has closed itself off to for just one night only at the Public Theater in New York City on May 27th.

Details and tickets

All these shows are likely to sell out, so use the links to get yourself tickets if you're interested. Starting later this spring look out for new episodes of ALL STORIES ARE FICTION, my podcast, which you can sign up for here.

Hope you are staying busy this spring,

md




Mike Daisey: Our Man in Havana
ONE NIGHT ONLY
May 27th at Joe's Pub in the Public Theater
Tickets and details

Mike Daisey travels to a mysterious world located just ninety miles from America—the island nation of Cuba, a world frozen in the American imagination and burned from our memories by embargoes and blockades, where communism still rules and a ballet dancer is paid the same as a surgeon or a farmer. Daisey brings his shrewd and scathing outsider’s eye to the gloriously decaying streets of Havana, using this changing landscape as a window to speak about the true legacies of American imperialism, and what it means for us to live today in a world that only recognizes capitalism and corporatism as a way of life. Both a ridiculous travelogue and a philosophical journey, Daisey’s monologue unearths the human connections between neighbors who can live so close and still refuse to speak.

Mike Daisey, hailed as “the master storyteller” and “one of the finest solo performers of his generation” by The New York Times, is the preeminent monologist in the American theater today. He has been compared to a modern-day Mark Twain and a latter-day Orson Welles for his provocative monologues that combine the political and the personal, weaving secret histories with hilarity and heart. This fall he performed a critically acclaimed 29-night live theatrical novel, All the Faces of the Moon, onstage at the Public in Joe’s Pub.

He has performed in theaters across five continents, ranging remote islands in the South Pacific to the Sydney Opera House to an abandoned theater in post-Communist Tajikistan. He’s been a guest on Real Time with Bill Maher, the Late Show with David Letterman, a longtime host and storyteller with The Moth, as well as a commentator and contributor to The New York Times, The Guardian, Harper’s Magazine, Newsweek, WIRED, Vanity Fair, Slate, Salon, NPR and the BBC. In a brief, meteoric career with This American Life, his shows are among the most listened to and downloaded episodes of that program’s nineteen year history.

He is currently at work on his second book, Here at the End of Empire, which will be published in 2015 by Simon and Schuster. He has been nominated for the Outer Critics Circle Award, two Drama League Awards, and is the recipient of the Bay Area Critics Circle Award, six Seattle Times Footlight Awards, the Sloan Foundation’s Galileo Prize, and a MacDowell Fellowship.

“The master storyteller—one of the finest solo performers of his generation.”
—The New York Times

“Pure magic.”
—New York Magazine

“He embraces the insightful hostility of the best comedy.”
—The New Yorker

The Playboy Interview: A Candid Conversation with Gawker's Nick Denton:

PLAYBOY: You're more willing than most people to organize your life according to principle and see how the experiment turns out.

DENTON: You could argue that privacy has never really existed. Usually people's friends or others in the village had a pretty good idea what was going on. You could look at this as the resurrection of or a return to the essential nature of human existence: We were surrounded by obvious scandal throughout most of human existence, when everybody knew everything. Then there was a brief period when people moved to the cities and social connections were frayed, and there was a brief period of sufficient anonymity to allow for transgressive behavior no one ever found out about. That brief era is now coming to an end.

Heart of Blandness: A Walking Tour of Silicon Valley:

Silicon Valley is also marketed as The Future of Humanity.

But as a human landscape, it's a crushingly boring sunny suburban slab of freeways, fast food, traffic, and long smoggy boulevards of faded retail sprawling out to endless housing developments of sand-colored stucco boxes. It's Phoenix with milder weather, Orlando minus the mosquitos.

Tech-loving travelers come from around the world to see Silicon Valley, but there's nothing to see—no Times Square, no French Quarter, just low-rise office parks and security guards circling the parking lots. Could anything be gained by walking from corporate landmark to corporate landmark? Maybe not, but two days of walking always beats two days of looking at a computer, even if I'd be walking from technology company to technology company.

Conclusive Evidence:

It’s hard to know how often people fail to commit suicide, except in movies where someone always comes in at just the right moment, playing it for laughs. How many of us have watched people we love walk back from the razor's edge? If they really meant to die, how is it possible that they could fail? It's only then you realize how our lives turn on the thinnest of coincidences, coming home too early or too late to save someone. It’s hard to know how to respond - pretend it never happened? Pretend they won’t try again? Wait for them to succeed next time? Both Stephen Fry and Mike Daisey have talked about their failures to slip away silently, but the ones who have succeeded, they give us no answers. The dead can’t talk, and anyway, everyone knows answers only lead to more questions.

Last night I thought again about the husband of my mother’s old college friend, who hanged himself when I was in high school. I had just met him and his family earlier that year. I can still remember his face, his thick shock of badger-striped salt-and-pepper hair. What we didn't know then was that he'd been battling depression for some time. One night, his wife called our home, her voice troubled, and I wrote down her phone number on a napkin that then was accidentally thrown away. In those days my Chinese was much worse than it is now; I'd forgotten her name, and it wasn't until a few days later that she finally reached my mom. I’ll never forget the shame that went through me when I heard why she'd called. I couldn't sleep without thinking about their son, some years younger than I, who'd been the one to find his father's body in their garage. I hope he understood, it wasn’t anything he did.

Invite-Only Oceanside Conference Vows to "Reset the Agenda for Women":

Next week, Makers is hosting a three-day conference where Sheryl Sandberg, Eric Schmidt, Tim Armstrong, and others plan to "reset the agenda for women in the workplace in the 21st century."

Where does one gather to hit the restart on the stagnant wage gap and institutionalized sexism for the next 86 years? At "the picturesque Terranea Resort, located on a breathtaking stretch of Pacific coastline," of course. The revolution also has time for "Sunrise Yoga" classes in the morning. Work-life balance, ladies and billionaires.

Like all great equal rights initiatives, this one is also invite-only:

'In God We Trust—but We Have Put Our Faith in Our Guns' - Ta-Nehisi Coates - The Atlantic:

Davis was sitting in a parked SUV outside the Jacksonville store with friends when Dunn, who is white, began complaining about their music. An argument ensued, and then ended, when Dunn fired his 9mm handgun into the vehicle. As the SUV raced off, Dunn stepped out of his car and fired again. Then he and his girlfriend drove to a hotel, checked in, and ordered a pizza. He never called the police and was only arrested because a witness jotted down his license plate. Dunn, who is mounting a Stand Your Ground defense, claimed a passenger in the vehicle had threatened him with shotgun—or a stick. The police found no gun.

Hello All,

It's a new year. To celebrate, we had a bacchanalian orgy in our Brooklyn home on the 31st, and burned a Christmas tree to cinders in a barely controlled, almost catastrophic incineration.



I also made a big new year's resolution: after years of performing, it is time to write.

So I'm letting the world know that I have committed to writing a new book.

Titled HERE AT THE END OF EMPIRE, it's drawn from many years of my monologues and will try to tell a story of our moment now at the sunset of America's golden age.

I'm delighted to announce that Simon and Schuster has enthusiastically bought the book, and have slated it for publication in 2015.

After the success of ALL THE FACES OF THE MOON I'm really looking forward to immersing myself in another gigantic project.

I'm also happy to announce that I will continue performing. We have shows happening over the next few months all across America, in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Richmond, Blacksburg, and beyond.

We've also decided to keep our podcast, ALL STORIES ARE FICTION, central to our work this year. We're putting up new shows all the time, recorded live around the world, including THE STORY OF THE GUN, the brand-new monologue I just created in North Carolina about guns, their history, and our charged relationship with them.

You can listen to all these stories for free by following this link.

I hope all your resolutions are fiery,

md


UPCOMING SHOWS:

RICHMOND

All Stories Are Fiction
University of Richmond
Modlin Center for the Arts
January 31st at 8pm
Details


LOS ANGELES

American Utopias
Center for the Art of Performance
at UCLA
February 6th
Details


VIRGINIA TECH

Faster Better Social
The Center for the Arts
at Virginia Tech
February 22nd at 8pm
Details


SAN FRANCISCO

American Utopias
Yerba Buena Arts Center
May 16th and 17th
Details

My personal Fox News nightmare: Inside a month of self-induced torture - Salon.com:

Given the statistics about Fox’s conservative influence and the way it misleads its viewers, I think it is fair to classify much of what it does as propaganda. My liberal cynicism seemed to render me immune to that — their O’Reilly-style hectoring eliciting a few laughs, but doing little to change my worldview. But Fox, as I came to discover, indulges in another form of opinion creation. Let’s call this the propaganda of ignorance. By choosing which stories to cover, and, perhaps more important, which stories to ignore, Fox is able to advance its political agenda in a much more subtle and insidious way.