On Rereading Bentley on Brecht

I'm coming across lots of great quotes, but I found this one particularly arresting:

When one of the best judges of drama said that the more original playwrights of the twenties "start completely fresh," he listed only antirealists. The antirealists always get all the credit for originality. Actually the realists were just as much in revolt. In a sense they were twice as much in revolt, since they rejected not only the antirealistic styles--such as expressionism--but the established naturalistic styles of the nineties. They wanted to be more naturalistic still.

In this essay, "From Strindberg to Brecht," Bentley is positioning Brecht as a kind of realist, with his Epic theater standing athwart expressionism. What's stunning to me about this quote, too, is how relevant these debates still seem to us now (and how we're already looking back on our own "nineties," and will before long face our very own "twenties").

Down in Front

For the love of God, will someone please come up with some kind of cellphone-blocking force field in theaters? The video below, from a recent Steady Rain preview starring you-know-whos, is skin-crawling to watch (though, come to think of it, if you can use a camera in the theater...). (h/t Playgoer)

Tuesday Link-o-Rama

• Sellars Othello not well-liked.
  
• Mark Blankenship's solution to office distractions.
  
• "Story is to meaning as sex is to life," and other pithy thoughts from Gus Schulenberg.
  
• Sweet: A right-wing apostate dedicates Tom Waits to his erstwhile allies.
  
• A new music blog.
  

Idiots, All of Them

Willem Dafoe, Elina Löwensohn, and Alenka Kraigher; photo by Nella Vera

Some priceless shots of Richard Foreman's upcoming Idiot Savant in rehearsal. (And yes, there seem to be three actors and three skirts here, ladies and gents.)

Tagger Tagged

Shepard "Hope" Fairey's Echo Park studio is oh-so-wittily tagged. Why am I not surprised that Gary Leonard was there?

Friday Random Links

• Joe Wilson as a black drag queen in Cabaret? (made you look--of course, it's not that Joe Wilson, or that one, but this one).
  
  
• Working stiff in Pied Pipers of the Lower East Side.
  
  
• Why Adorno hated protest songs. (Reminds me of a Eugene Chadbourne lyric: "Governments love anti-war songs / they say sing 'em loud, and we'll sing along / because it reminds them, in a musical way / that there's a war.")
  
  
• Pace JP Shanley, how gossip can be good.
  
  
• Baby on board.
  
  

What 99 Seats Said

For my money, the last word on the arts/service conference call brouhaha.

And one last depressing thought of my own: I share Mirror Up to Nature's fear: that if the right's partisan trolls are going to freak about something this innocuous, and so superficially connected to the endowment and not at all connected to its grant-giving, what will happen if they start "following the NEA grant money trails to find a connection to something salacious"? It's worth remembering that the last NEA funding controversy, in the mid- to late 1980s, came well before the age of YouTube and social media, let alone Fox News.)

UPDATE: I spoke too soon. The incomparable Ian David Moss has an uncharacteristically, and to my mind righteously hot-tempered summation of the cynical opportunism behind this "scandal."