Theatre: What Is This Thing Called Love?

 The Effect by Lucy Prebble, Directed by Mathew Wright, Arts West through July 13

Arts West closes its season with a extremely powerful performance. The Lovely Bride took it in after an excellent Sushi dinner at Mashiko, then settled in for what turned out to be an excellent, amazing, emotional performance. This is one of those plays where I cannot say enough good things about it. 

The Effect deals with the meeting of biology and psychology. Connie (Anna Mulia) and Tristan (Morgan Gwilym Tso) are volunteers for a set of drug trials. The trials are overseen by Dr. Lorna James (Sunam Ellis) under the direction of biochemical entrepreneur Dr. Toby Sealey (Tim Couran, embracing the spirit of Steve Job) 

Tristan is a slacker who has does this before, and is there for the payout - he's flirty and nervous. Connie is a student and treats the drug trials as a personal test - she wants to give the "right answers". The drug itself elevates dopamine levels, which affects, among other things, affects emotions and falling in love.

And yes, things go off the rails quickly. Connie and Tristan fall in love. Maybe its their own doing, or the drugs or their emotions. They don't know, and it is frightening. They have their own challenges which surface in the process as they do not believe they have control of their own decisions. Lorna and Toby have their own emotional wounds driving them forward and affecting the results and what they choose to do with them. Lorna in particular is at the fragile center of the storm. Both couples spiral into anger and argument, and no one knows the truth of the matter. Are Connie and Tristan in love because of the drug or is the drug just affecting their own emotions? Are we all victims of our own biochemistry?

And it all works. The actors are frankly terrific. Their characters are human and relatable. The descent into doubt, desperation, and despair is completely believable. The dialogue is natural and often choreographed, the dancelike move of the actors. There are a lot of big ideas fighting with the big emotions in the play, and the bare-bones set of a simple raised platform, limned by neon lights, gives the actors the space to big it all home. The direction (Mathew Wright, also the Artistic Director of Arts West) fits all the pieces together marvelously. The resolution is ferocious and devastating, to the point that the stunned audience at the end was silenced for a few breaths before thunderously applauding.

It all left me shaken in a way that few plays do.

Arts West had an incredible season. Both The Effect and Covenant were among the best theater I've seen in Seattle this year. Guards at the Taj was heartbreaking, and Athena was very good (the Lovely B loved it). The weakest of the lot, the sequel to last years Snowed In, was still festive in the spirit of the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland lets-put-on-a-show performances.

They did a fantastic job, and The Effect was the icing on the cake. Go see it. 

More later, 

Theatre: A Very British Meltdown

The Children by Lucy Kirkwood, directed by Tim Bond, Seattle Rep through 15 March.

OK, this is more like it.

 After the wallowing in Toxic Masculinity portrayed in True West, I will admit to being chary about the current season, and what little I knew of The Children gave me pause. I usually go into plays with a bare minimum of prep and preconceptions, but the poster (shown here) of a nasty looking gas mask prepared me for a painful confrontation with our ongoing climate catastrophe.

And it is, but is also an excellent play of relationships and intelligence and responsibility. Well-written, well-produced, and well-acted, it was a tonic to True West and its ilk, and while not something I would insist you go out and see (Hey, Kids! Want to hear about a nuclear meltdown?), it was a rewarding afternoon at the theater.

Here's the skinny - a Fukushima-level nuclear accident occurs on the coast of Britain, with similar results of an exclusion zone hugging deadly levels of  radiation. Still life goes on (Hello, jackpot!).
Hazel (Jeanne Paulsen) and Robin (the stalwart R. Hamilton Wright) have retreated to a cottage outside the zone, where no-nonsense Hazel keeps the household running while adventurous Robin goes back into the zone to tend to the cows they left behind during the evacuation.  Then Rose (Carmen Roman), an old colleague, shows up unannounced for a visit. And Hazel punches her in the nose. Accidentally.

And, what is not made clear at the get-go, but soon becomes clear, is that all three are former engineers at that plant, retired before the entire meltdown. Hazel thinks they earned their retirement, even given the discomfort of a glowing nuclear core a few miles away. Robin is a bit more adventurous. And Rose? Well, the play does take its time in explaining why Rose is back and what she wants, but she gets there in the end and kicks off the finale.

And the thing that impressed me in all this is that Kirkwood wrote these three characters as both smart people and as friends. That's tough. Making them smart without chipping off and likability or humanity, making them friends without shying away from their own secrets and indiscretions. They mock and entertain each other throughout. Hazel and Robin are Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolfe if Martha and George actually liked each other and weren't such utter a-holes. (And yeah, WAoVW seems to haunt every play these days, either by similarity or difference). They can be nasty to each other in that very British way that radiates affection. And in their banter, Kirkwood gives her characters a sense of reality and reliability I haven't seen elsewhere.

The acting is top-notch as well. Wright is the Rep Veteran who has been in more than 50 productions, and who I've mentioned before. Paulsen takes the tough road of being the stable, sane center, to the point of being pedantic and unbending, and still makes her accessible. And Roman is cat-like Rose with her secrets and strength, and yes, sinister in places (Hazel makes the comment), And still they are friends at the end of it, and yeah, transformed in the process.

A good play, a solid piece of theater, and while realistic in its threats, redeeming in its characters. Touchy subject matter, but that's the sort of thing that theater needs to do sometimes. Nicely done.

More later,

[Oh, a program note - there will be no review of Jitney, the next one up on the Rep's list. I will be otherwise engaged and the Lovely Bride and I have seen a Rep production of it earlier - We have been in Seattle long enough that we are now doubling up on our August Wilson plays. Gave the tickets away to a friend, but there will be no review here.]

Earthquake in Sensurround

Everyone on the West Coast has by this time read this article. It is an excellent description of the potential hazard of a major quake in the Cascadia fault, and how we are pretty unprepared for it.

Not that we aren't more prepared than we were. After the Nisqually Quake of 2001, there was a lot of improvements in building design and even such laggards as I have made sure to tie down our china cabinets and water heaters. But for something this massive would overwhelm whatever attempts people would make to protect themselves from devastation. When it happens, it will be pretty bad.

We can do more. A couple years after the quake, I was working for a company in downtown Bellevue in one of the new skyscrapers. And I was very aware of the fact that several faults crossed right underneath Bellevue. I asked what the earthquake plan was, and was told that everyone should take a shard from the server and walk down the fire escapes. No rally points, nothing beyond just getting out of the building.

The article itself does move around geographically, though, and that seems to increase the apparent damage. While Seattle itself will likely be flattened by the quake itself, it is the seaside communities that will be primarily wiped out by the resulting tidal wave. The article allows the reader to conflate the two, such that Seattle would be destroyed both by quake and tsunami.

How much Seattle gets of such a tsunami would actually depend on where the quake epicenters. Far south along the plate we have the bulk of the Olympics between us and the worst of the waves. If it breaks are the mouth of the Strait of Juan de Fuca, then we have a nice shotgun channel pointed right at Whidby Island.

The only ironic humor that I can take out of the article is the comment that "everything West of I-5 will be toast". Grubb Street if fives miles EAST of I-5, so I guess we'll be fine (oh, quit laughing. I'm clutching at all the straws I can). Yes, if the big one hits, much like the big one they have been awaiting in LA, it will be pretty harsh.

Of course, let us make lemonade out of these lemons. I recommend that all natives of Seattle spread this story. Send it to relatives and would-be job prospects. One of the great challenges to our neck of the woods is that we have become TOO Successful. Rent is skyrocketing. The roads are clogged. And every single-story building in Bellevue seems to be under siege by high-rise developers. And people STILL want to move here. We need to scare them off, and the idea that we will all die from a massive earthquake may just be the thing.

And if it doesn't scare them off, we'll tell them about the ACTIVE VOLCANO.

More later,

The Political Desk - I-522: What's in Your Shopping Cart?

 I don’t fear GMOs, but by the same token, I’d like them to be labeled. Let me explain.

The most expensive initiative on the ballot, in terms of how much money people are willing to spend to stop it, I-522 requires we label food that is genetically modified. This is more than just Mendelian crossbreeding, but getting into the heart of the matter and throwing a gene into the genetic chain that might improve yield, or extend shelf-life or act as a naturally-growing pesticide. GMO stands for Genetically Modified Organisms. Yes, you can throw that factoid out in the next dinner party. 

And to be honest, this is a pretty cool thing on the face of it. March of science and all that. My friend Wolfgang Baur has provided links from the American Academy of Science (the guys who publish SCIENCE, and usually part of the calm voice of reason) that indicate that GMO crossbreeds are generally as safe as normal crops. Of course, given what we’ve done with our normal crops over the years, that is praising with faint damns (we wash our fruit these days, but more from the concern of pesticides and chemicals than dirt and debris).

But I am still in favor of labels. Why? I’d like the data. I DO read the nutritional information on my multiple attempts to cut calories. I read them to make sure that there are no eggs (the Lovely Bride is allergic) or are free of MSG (gives the mom-in-law headaches). Yes, if you’re tweaking the genes, I’d like to know that there's a bit of chicken in there BEFORE the Lovely Bride has to hit the ER.

And it is not just me. Japan suspended import of US wheat this summer when some GMO wheat was found in an wheat field in Oregon. They found it when a farmer could not clear the field using Monsanto pesticides, in a bit of irony. So yeah, other people want to read the labels as well.

Both sides are pushing hard on this. I think the pro-labeling side is raising the specter of Frankenfood and the overwhelming pressure from Monsanto, who apparently read about the calorie companies in Paolo Bacigalupi's The Windup Girl and said “Yeah, that’s the dystopia WE want!”. Plus, their opponents of the labeling have been hiding their contributions, finally coming out only when the State Attorney General threatened a lawsuit (The big hidden contributors? Coke, Pepsi, and Nestle. So, what ARE in those Fritos?)

But the anti-side is pushing hard that it is a bad law – too many loopholes, not enough definitions, too many corner cases. Fine. Then let’s pass it and you can spend all the money you are currently putting in to defeat it into helping make the law better. Close those loopholes. Tighten up the regulations. It is not like you guys don't have access to the corridors of power or anything. 

I’m going with YES on this one. Not because of any scare tactics, or that Pepsico doesn't want you to know what is in the Doritos, or because Monsanto wants to be a calorie king, but because I want data. I read the box copy, and I vote.

More later,

30 Days of Science

I'm always coming across stuff on the 'net that I think "Ooh, this would be interesting", but then I don't get around to posting it, or fifty-three other people post about it, and it gets forgotten.

But I want to make sure I mention THIS before I get carried away with other things. It is the chance to live in the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago for a month. IN the museum. This would be a dream opportunity for me. Heck, if I still worked for TSR up in Lake Geneva, I would see if I could arrange a leave of absence to pull this off.

If you ARE in the Chicago area, and are, as we say, "between gigs", I would strongly recommend applying. Go for it, guys!

More later,

Evolutionary Wars

The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution by Richard Dawkins, Free Press, Distributed by Simon & Schuster Digital Sales, 2009

How I Got This Book: Recommended by a coworker who name-checked a number of books he has been reading. Since I was looking for books to take on my Pittsburgh trip, I downloaded a couple of them onto my Kindle.

I've talked about my Kindle before, and find it to be an excellent travel book, but some volumes do not fair well on the device. This is one of them. Greatest Show makes copious use of annotations and footnoted sources (which it navigates well enough). It uses extensive black and white illos and tables (which reproduce badly) and color plates (which reproduce worse), and the bibliography and index sprawl over more Kindle pages than they really need to, since the multiple indents in their formatting do not come across easily.

And while it is tempting to think about this book's possible evolutionary success within the environmental niche of e-publishing, that would be pretty wrong. Because evolution by natural selection belongs to one particular science, and when you transport it to another field, things get dodgy fast (like the "Social Darwinism" of Herbert Spenser, which takes Darwin's biology and transfers it into a rationale of why Rich People need not feel sympathy for Poor People). While tempting (and I do it all the time), when you're talking about natural selection, the natural part of the concept is applicable.

In any event, the book was both a good summary of stuff I knew (speciation, continental drift, mutation) and things I needed updated on (protein folding, which is sort of organic origami). Dawkins is best known for his avowed opposition to the religious who reject Darwinism (and most of the post-15th century) out of hand. He fires more than a few high hard ones against the religious institutions and their minions, but over the course of the book, I find that I can understand where the religious-based evolution-deniers are coming from.

I mean, if evolution was a religion, it would make the Cthulhu Mythos look all warm and cuddly.

First off, it take an uncaring universe to its logical extreme. There is a pass-fail existence where the tests come continually and the price of failure is always death. Old-Testament Jehovah is more forgiving than this grim clockwork of action and reaction.

And it's about species, and not about you. Not only are you just another of the striver in the universe, success of your species means absolutely nothing about your personal needs. It is about a larger genetic grading, of which you are a very very small part.

And its not really about you species than about your genes, stupid. The entire purpose of natural selection is the guarantee that the most suitable genes survive. You survive only because your genetic package crafted a suitable housing to create more genes. In these terms, the childless are evolutionary failures (I can envision a conservative evolutionary distopia where children are mandated, and only tested and harvested before they can reproduce). Genetic duplication (with all of its additional mutations) is about as close to salvation as you can hope for.

And because it is about your genes, your fate is sealed at birth. Never mind the concept of "Grace" among us Protestants - this is worse. Your genetic makeup is sealed before you even attained sentience. And if that makeup is suitable for the current environment, or even if that makeup is outdone by the makeups of OTHER individuals whose mutations are better, well, it sucks to be you.

And in the face of all this, we have a strong strain of "human exceptionalism". Despite this supposedly uncaring universe, we are here, and thriving (mostly). We take care of our suboptimal mutations and, spitting in the face of nature, allow them to pass on genetic material. We also pass along a "soft" heritage in culture, art, and knowledge, which exists outside the hardwired chemistry and biology of our forms. You can make a case of both secular and religious thought as being in direct opposition to the uncaring clockwork of natural selection.

The big thing is, of course, that evolution is NOT a belief system, any more than gravity (also called "Intelligent Falling") is. It is a scientific tool that explains the natural world, and knowing where that tool can be applied (like a hammer to a nail) and when it shouldn't (like a hammer to a screw) is part of the process. To haul evolution into the court of beliefs is like hauling religion into the court of science. It is condemning those apples for making overly tart orange juice.

But if you consider science to be an alternate belief system (as opposed to, you know, science), the frightening nature of evolution is apparent. You can suddenly sense the palpable revulsion in the faithful to the threat of this line of thought, even though there should be no threat.

Lovecraft would, on the other hand, be delighted.

More later,

Norwescon, After Action Report

Norwescon went very well - they always impress me with their organization, right down to such nice little details as putting your schedule on the back of the little name stands that you use in the panels.

One of the things I appreciate is that I get thrown into some interesting panels with people I'd actually be interested in listening to. Like a discussion of creating with fantasy pantheons (pretty normal) with Sean Reynolds (which was a bonus) and an expert in philosophy and religion (which made it all the more interesting as we compared modern fantasy mythologies against older traditions). I really like the eclectic nature of the con and its panels.

But to be honest, my biggest problem is that the rest of my life tends to get involved. The day job and the freelance work have both conspired to keep me busy, and deciding to take the weekend for the convention and try to work these around it made for a rather hectic few days with precious little time for myself. Add to that a theater date Sunday afternoon and it made for a bit more activity than I really needed.

So now I stand once more at the head of the week with a mild feeling of exhaustion already firmly in place. Ah, well, at least I will have the memories. Until exhaustion claims them as well.

More later,

(Pictured above:photo by Jodi Lane, looted from Sean Reynold's Facebook page. You humble narrator and Sean talking about gods. Yes, I am wearing steampunk goggles on top of my baseball hat. I find more people take you more seriously this way).

Carl Sagan Day

Today is the first annual Carl Sagan Day. Please remember to set your mind a couple decades ahead for the duration of the day.

More later,

Song of the Cosmos

The Voter's Guides are out, the ballots are arriving in the mailboxes, and I will be doing my recommendation thing. But in the meantime, have a Carl Sagan/Stephen Hawkings mashup.



Two things here - it may look so cheesy and "Star Trek Next Gen" now, but Carl Sagan was a spokesman that married knowledge with eloquence and poetry. The other thing is that it reminded me about something George Carlin once said - "Comedy is music you make with your mouth". The cadence and rhythm of Sagan's statements, easily parodied ("Beel-yuns and beel-yuns of stars") was one of the things that made him so listenable.

More later,

Hail, Hail

Busy today - so you guys are just going to have to go play in the Effing Hail.

Just doing my part to destroy your productivity at work. More later,

Why I Am Like I Am

I found this old New Yorker/Charles Addams cartoon the other day. I first encountered it when I was but a wee bairn -



I think it explains so much about engineers, gnomes, and the asura.

More later,

Hey, Hey, We're the Monks

Anathem by Neil Stephenson, William Morrow, Kindle version, 2008.

So here’s my history with Neil Stephenson's works:

Never read Zodiac or Big U. Thought the first fifty pages of Snow Crash were brilliant, but it trailed off after that. Loved the first fifty pages of Diamond Age, then drifted off after that, not finishing. So I had an idea that Mr. Stephenson wrote a great first fifty pages, then slacked a bit after getting the gig.

Then Cryptonomicon. Good book, filled with juicy bits, but now he no longer had to do the first fifty pages, so it started in low gear and stayed there for the duration. Great bits, but at the end, I had to fess up that I didn’t quite get a “what have we learned” sort of moment (OK, independent systems beat organized systems, but that’s kind of meta).

Loved the Baroque Cycle, but by this time I knew what I was getting into, so I was very tolerant of the (regular) digressions into British coinage and the anachronisms (turning Jack Shaftoe’s entrance into Paris into a Hollywood musical was inspired, but purely playing to the crowds). The series became my "vacation books" - to be lugged around when I knew I would have a lot of down time. I think it took me longer to read it than it took Mr. Stephenson to write it.

Now Anathem. Probably his best work to date. It is his best story as a story, in that it has a strong narrative flow. Also missing his more detailed digressions, sending his more detailed mathematical proofs to the back of the book and its appendices.

The book is a about aliens, monks, mathematics and philosophy. In an alternate world of Arbre, progress has halted for thousands of years at a particular level of technology, with advanced science being relegated to monastic organizations. Erasmus is a monk in one of those organizations, and we get a good feel for monastic life before something strange makes orbital insertion and all rolling hell breaks loose.

Stephenson builds his own jargon for a religious order on an alien word, and does a fantastic job, in that his jargon evokes both religious and scientific meanings at the same time. Erasmus belongs to a math, which evokes mathematics, mass, and myth, and is a member of a concent, a nice conflation of convent and concentration. Such words-you-almost-understand pepper the volume, and while it has a nice glossary in the back, by the time you reach it you know most of them through usage.

Stephenson also plays fair with the reader. We get to know things as Erasmus gets to know him, and his slightly out-of-it nature means we get a lot of background in the outside world as a result of his actions. The object in orbit kicks up a lot of dust in that outside world, to the point that astronomy is banned within the maths, then the panicky Saecular Powers bring in the learned brothers and sisters to solve the problem.

Erasmus and his fraas and suurs within the math are more rounded characters than I have seen before, and while I expected them to be merely replaceable viewpoints, they all developed into characters I recognized by the end. This goes for those in the outside world as well. There is a brief whiff of Hogwarts in some of the monkish proceedings, as Erasmus is just the young man to be in the right place at the right time, but it serves to keep the story humming along.

Stephenson also provides probably some of the best-grounded arguments against advanced technology I've heard. His Saeculars make sense in their embrace of a technology lower than they might otherwise have, and he comes up with a good excuse for how to keep technology at a slightly-advanced for 21st century level. They aren't bad guys, which also nice. And he explains why all that jargon sounds so similar to our own, and why Arbre is like our world but different.

It is an elegant, straightforward read. At first I credited the Kindle I was reading it on, but the fact is that the story pulls the reader through smoothly. The writing is almost sparse in places given the scope he has taken on. The ending verges on 2001-inside-the-monolith head trips, but in the end Stephenson delivers an excellent book that not only presents a good tale, but bulls its way through most of Terran philosopher, from Plato to Descartes to Schrodinger.

My one regret? It being electric bits, I cannot pass it along to someone else so they can enjoy. That's a downside of the Kindle, turning everyone into end users, but such is the nature of Saecular plots of the panjandrums.

More later,

Your Plutonian Science of the Day

Yesterday was the 79th anniversary of the discovery of Pluto. I was otherwise occupied, but make up for it by providing this excellent link on 10 things you don't know about Pluto.

Well, most of them I did know, but I've read up on that sort of thing.

More later,

Earth-Shattering Kaboom

A hundred years ago, SOMETHING smacked into the Earth in Siberia, resulting the Tunguska Event.

Comet? Meteorite? UFO? Tesla's Death Ray? We dunno.

Happy birthday, Tunguska, and keep watching the skies.

More later,

Life In These United States

The Bad News: LIfe Expectancy in the US is down

The Good News: I live in one of the places where life expectancy is going up.

The Bad News: This really isn't going to help if I insist on eating that third cheeseburger.

But in a more serious vein, the maps provided with this article are instructive. I would expect higher mortalities in more urban populations, but our life expectancies are dropping away in more rural and red areas. And not to scare anyone, but one of the biggest drops is concentrated in Oklahoma, where the Sonics are going. Not to make anyone nervous, but its just worth mentioning.

But in the meantime, put down that cheeseburger and back away.

Church and State

So here's where I shear myself away from some of my fellows. A lot of them (in mailing lists and in journals) are comfortable with the idea that science and religions are opposites. Black and white. On and off. Thinking and feeling. Up and down. One cannot exist in the presence of the other.

Actually, I think of them as salt and pepper, which can be combined (in various amounts) but really two completely different things, and have completely different paths to your kitchen table. Salt is a mineral, an edible rock that appeals to certain parts of your tastes, while pepper is a plant (a dried fruit of a flowering vine, actually), which appeals to other regions of one's taste buds. To say that the two are polar opposites is kinda silly, and in the same fashion I think the science/religion split is a false dichotomy as well.

In fact, the two work together better than working apart. Over the course of my lifetime, there have been Biblical stories that have benefited from scientific support. As a lad, the Great Flood was a "bible story", a religious tall tale with a moral ("Don't cheese off the Lord"). Yet over the years archaeological thought has moved from "was there a Great Flood?" to "Was there a single flood or a series of localized floods?") Indeed, discovery of previous legends, like that of Deucalion, act to support the existence of a biblical flood, not diminish it.

Similarly, faith has supported science over the years. Gregor Mendel (genetics), Roger Bacon (scientific method), and Copernicus (astronomy) were all men of the cloth and received encouragement from their church. There are the monks in Ireland who kept knowledge alive in the wake of the fall of Rome, and the flowering of Islam brought new concepts, even new words (Algebra, Algorithm, Alchol) into European thought.

I think that both science and religion are spectrums as opposed to absolutes, and when we have a hard orthodoxy in control in either case, there difficulty for the rest of us. In religion we currently seem to be under the sway of the orthodox forces, but not too many years ago we were in the porgressive grips of Vatican II and the Ecumenical Movement. In science we have seen where the hide-bound individuals who control the mechanisms twisting vital research for their own ends (Gallo and the HIV virus comes to mind). Yet in both cases it is moving across a spectrum (of course, in both cases, the installed orthodoxy wants to KEEP their power, and to that end seeks to exclude others who might disagree. The spectrum becomes a single wavelength).

There is pseudo-religion and there is psuedo-science. Both science and religion can have bad ideas, false leads and dead ends. The Catholic Church, seeking to answer the question - what happens to the unbaptized innocent? - ended up with the concept of Limbo, which was recently abandoned. Science similarly has a long history of mechanisms created to make the theory work - Ether (if light is a wave, how does it travel through a vacuum?) orphlogiston (what is that makes stuff burn?). Now dark matter and superstring theory are similar constructs. Both science and religion have a tendency to pick stuff up, examine it, and discard it if it does not work. In both cases, problems show up when the thought process becomes rigid and rejecting (Papal infallibility, corporate-paid research think tanks), seeking to exert temporal power as opposed to seeking knowledge, comprehension, and understanding.

Science and religion are playing fields, where conservative and progressive forces move back and forth. Orthodox forces in both seem to limit both what is going out (in the way of sharing understanding) and what is coming in (as far as believers or theorists who may hold contrary views). While it is very easy to identify an established extreme as an enemy, it is not representative of the entire spectrum. Indeed, calling all scientists heretics and all faithful people ignorant supports those orthodoxies by restricting the number of participants that need to be controlled, exiling those non-, un-, and wrong believers into some sort of darkness where they may be ignored.

The answer for both spectrums is "more light". More thought, more discussion, more examination of both science and faith. Because only then can either sphere move forward.

More later,