Dear FOT,

[Julie]

I am always sending good luck your way. I hope it isn't too late to send more good luck your way. I hope you win the lottery and can do whatever you want because you are the best person I don't know. Better than Jimmy Carter and maybe even Tom Scharpling. I'm not certain about Tom Scharpling. I feel kind of dirty for saying that. You are at least tied with Tom Scharpling, though. But your stranger ranking in my head doesn't mean anything except that your great and I will send the best luck vibes to you.

[Wes]

Congratulations on the movie thing, Grote. But I still like Jimmy Carter better than you. He has better Harrison Ford stories.

[Shaggy 2 Grote]

That's true, Wes, especially the time they did all that blow in the Oval Office.  Also, I am nowhere near as good as Tom at almost anything*, let's just get that out of the way right now.

Thanks for the tips and good wishes everybody!

My trashing of Cory Doctorow was pretty half-assed, I have to admit - I'm no expert.  But I have a general sense that a lot of these copyleft/techno-utopian guys (including some I consider friends) are totally unwilling to look at the possible drawbacks to the idea of the commons.  I believe that the system is broken (not just in terms of copyright and intellectual property, but privatization and corporate rule in general), but that it's going to take a lot more than a few enterprising nerds** to fix it.  At the risk of sounding totally pretentious, I consider myself what Frederic Jameson calls an anti-anti-utopian.  I think that utopian thinking can be fairly silly at best, dishonest and amoral at worst, but I'm not an anti-utopian, either.  I do believe that the way forward is to embrace utopian thinking with utter clear-eyed honesty about pitfalls and drawbacks.  At least that's what I said in the pitch meeting.

Seattle FOT: yes indeed, I gathered from the website and the money involved that this was a low-budget outfit, but both the Rep and ACT have chickened out on me in the past, plus I like the other artists Schmeater has produced, so I was like, sure, why not.  My friend who is the lit manager at the Rep warned me that they may not be able to get the strongest older actors, which is 2/3 of the cast of this show, but oh well. I've been trying to break into Seattle for years now.  It's happening in March '09 - don't know if they're bringing me out or not, but I will definitely try to get you comps if I can.  Oh, ditto for Gilly or any other Twin Cities FOT - I have a show coming up in MN next month.  I'll put that one in the Extra-Curricular thread.

One drawback to all this - I have to turn the script around incredibly quickly while still teaching and working on 2 play commissions, so it's going to put a serious dent in my board presence.  Not like this place isn't plenty of fun without me, but I want everyone to know that even if I can't check in for a while, I miss you all and am listening every week.  And I'll be back, though I hope it's not all totally different people by then.

Though who am I kidding?  I'm supposed to be working right now.




*I would say except maybe playwriting but I've been doing that for years
**That Margaret Mead quote notwithstanding

[John Junk 2.0]

Two footnotes?  It's a shame he died and all, but I think somebody here maybe needs to take a break from revisiting his David Foster Wallace back catalog... 

[Shaggy 2 Grote]

Just for that, here's a third footnote: I might be a better playwright than Tom now, but give him about 15-20 minutes of coaching and he'll probably have me beat.

[Wes]

This thread should merge with the "I can do that!!" thread to form a potentially explosive "I'd be better at ____ than Tom" thread. Which could then possibly spin off into its own reality series.

[Emily]

From New Yorker Profiles: Why Me? Alec Baldwin’s disappointment, undimmed by success.

“I always think, What if you just took your hand off the wheel, and slowly, over time, it all went away, and your life became about, you know, ‘Is the mail here yet?’ I always think about that.” But this dream of disengagement quickly gave way: in the space of a few minutes, sitting in weak sun on a New Jersey driveway, smoking a cigarette, Baldwin imagined himself as the restaurant critic of the Times; the proprietor of an inn near Syracuse; and the presenter of a classical-music show on public radio. “I could do that,” he said, and he wasn’t exactly joking. He cares about classical music; he began to take an interest in his twenties. (Perhaps not surprisingly, he adores Mahler and can’t quite see the point of Mozart.) “To sit there in the studio and just say”—a rich radio voice—“ ‘And now Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 6, with Charles Dutoit and the Montreal Symphony Orchestra.’ Click. Hit a button, and then you sit back and listen, and they pay you for that. And I can’t imagine they pay you as much as the movies, but to me it’s getting to that point where there’s just something else I want to do. I don’t know what it is. I’m tired of being somebody else. I spend the waking hours of my life saying things that other people think and say and do. And behaving as someone else. I’m tired of it. I want to be me! I want to be myself!” - Alec Baldwin

[Julie]

This thread should merge with the "I can do that!!" thread to form a potentially explosive "I'd be better at ____ than Tom" thread. Which could then possibly spin off into its own reality series.

If you haven't started that thread yet, I'll go start it.

[samir]

This thread should merge with the "I can do that!!" thread to form a potentially explosive "I'd be better at ____ than Tom" thread. Which could then possibly spin off into its own reality series.

Hosted by Jerry Van Dyke, who is done crunching crime.