A Life-changing Panel

Over the years, I've felt that certain books, plays, movies, poems, works of art had changed my life. And it goes without saying that many people and places have.

But never would I have expected that a panel entitled EBooks: New Trend for a New Decade would have that power.

I'd learned about the panel some weeks earlier. In a list of its spring programs, the Center for Communication emailed this description:

As more readers turn to digital books, a variety platforms are emerging and with them, a new wave of opportunities. Find out how writers and publishers are embracing multimedia and repurposing content to create "enhanced reading" experiences - and learn about the skills you'll need to enter this brave new world of publishing.

I was ambivalent. As a writer needing to market her work, I'd been to a lot of panels on the brave new digital publishing world, addressing issues like whether self-published works are taken seriously, online marketing resources, and how much html writers need to know. Did I really need another one?

But this turned out to be not just another "how to" panel--but "why to"--not just about how publishing is changing but how our world changing--a truly visionary panel, which I wish my sci fi loving boyfriend could have witnessed.

I'm still thinking about what I heard there, and have finally resolved to join the Twittering throngs. And when I do, these are folks I will follow.

Here are a few quotes and paraphrases transcribed from my illegible notes that may at least convey the sense of what got said.

Richard Eoin Nash:

"The individual is a construct."

"The industrial revolution style model of production is over."

"If you get to choose to be an intermediary, you can choose what kind of intermediary you will be."

Reading more intimate than sex: Someone whispering in your ear for 15 hours.

Re: libraries: "Power is in the hands of those who can orchestrate demand."

Embracing community as a way of understanding the future of content.

"In a sense, books brought about the kind of society we have now."

How writers will make a living in the future: "The creation of unhackable experiences."

“minimal viable product” For many people the cell phone is the effective credit card.

"The genius of Twitter is that it allows you to see what people are talking about."

Bob Stein:

"The core competency of future publishing is the core competency of gaming now."

"World of Warcraft is fiction."

Individuals are going to be in groups based on collaborating. If we don't get there, it'll just be because we've done ourselves in.

“Everything we know about our daily life is about to change”

"We're too far ahead too make any money, but it's an interesting place."

"You can't move from a society based on the individual to a society based on groups without ditching capitalism."

"Writers are going to learn what musicians have learned: they're going to get paid to show up."

Matt Shatz:

"Download a 4-square app."

For further information about the useful free programs offered by the Center for Communication, see www.cencom.org

The Man Who Ate Michael Rockefeller . . .

. . . might be a title that turns off more potential audience members than it entices. At least given the rave reviews the play garnered, that's one explanation for the significant number of empty seats in the modest-sized theater when I saw it on Saturday night.

If you're among those rendered queasy by the very idea the title proposed, don't worry (spoiler alert): the cannibal feast is not actually staged. But what is staged, and beautifully, is among the most gripping, moving, and memorable 65 minutes of theater I've seen.

The Man Who Ate Michael Rockefeller, adapted by Jeff Cohen from the story of the same name by Christopher Stokes, is about far more than the possible fate of Michael Rockefeller, who in 1961 at the age of 23 disappeared in the Asmat of New Guinea. It's a vivid portrait of one of the last of the world's ancient peoples, on the verge of having their values and culture extinguished by Western contact. Though leavened by many moments of hilarity, it's an elegy for what's been lost.

For what survives, visit the Michael C. Rockefeller Wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

To immerse yourself in a vanished world and free yourself, at least momentarily, from the desire to accumulate millions of the papers that are our medium of exchange, catch The Man Who Ate Michael Rockefeller.

It's at the ArcLight Theater, 152 W. 71 St. For tickets: smarttix.com or 212-868-4444.

You've got one more week.

Next book by a friend I don't want to read

I don't expect Ron Rosenbaum's latest, How the End Begins, to be a fun read, though the author's brilliant wit will no doubt be in evidence now and again.

I do expect it to be profoundly, stomach churningly scary--given that it's an account by one of our finest journalists of the likely road to a nuclear war.

Not a book I want to read, but one I need to. Just hoping it leaves the reader not in total despair but with some insight into what we might do to get off the nuclear road before the end.

authors.simonandschuster.ca/Ron-Rosenbaum/47903494

Can't wait to watch The Clock. . . .

But for now it's gone, and I didn't have the patience to wait in the cold for an hour or so outside the Paul Cooper Gallery, where it was recently on view. And anyway, even if I'd got in, would have only been willing to devote an hour or two to this marathon of a movie.

The Clock is a 24-hour compilation showing the passage of time in movies, so edited that any time one spies on a dial can reflect the actual time you're watching.

I'm guessing one of these days The Clock will turn up at the Museum of Modern Art, possibly with enough screening segments that one could see the entire movie. I wonder how many folks aside from its creator, Christian Marclay, have seen it all--and whether even he has watched the whole thing straight through.

Which sounds like the way it should be seen, and perhaps will be by some hardy folks once the DVD is out, allowing pauses for bathroom breaks during Clock-watching marathon slumber parties.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/04/arts/design/04marclay.html

The Great Game

It's a rare opportunity: for a few more days, if you live in New York City, you can catch the Tricycle Theater's moving and informative production of The Great Game: Afghanistan--more than a dozen short plays, along with monologues and commentary, that deal with incursions into that country by foreign empires over the last two centuries.

But it's a tough choice; if you're not willing to devote more than 7 hours plus travel time to seeing the whole thing, which do you opt for: Part I, which deals with the British empire's adventures--19th and early 20th centuries--that give the event its title; Part 2, with the Soviet Union, whose efforts ended up contributing to the union's breakup; and Part 3--you can guess whose turn it is.

Unfortunately, many of the potential audience seem to be electing not to make the choice--not to see any of it--so there are very substantial discounts available: substantial enough that I went to all three in a one-day Marathon.

If you can only go to one, I'd say, go the Part I--odds are it will persuade you to see the rest.

Presented by the Public Theater, The Great Game is at the NYU Skirball Center through Dec. 19.

For tickets, call 212-352-3101 or 866-811-4111, or go to www.skirballcenter.nyu.edu

But first look around for those discounts.

Wisdom from The Hunchback

Saturday evening before the election, I'd expected to be contradancing, but after a day spent campaigning in Allentown for Sestak, one ankle wasn't up to it.

So instead I checked out Turner Classic Movies's Halloween weekend lineup of horror films--and discovered the 1939 version of Victor Hugo's The Hunchback of Notre Dame, directed by William Dieterle, and featuring a brave, heartrending, and unforgettable performance by Charles Laughton in the title role.

Though this version takes significant liberties with the novel's plot, the end in particular, it seems true to its spirit, and has much to say about intolerance.

Among its many memorable lines is this, from one of a band of gypsies being attacked as foreigners:

"You came yesterday, we came today."

GASLAND

Gasland is an award-winning documentary--Special Jury prize at Sundance 1010--that had trouble attracting a distributor, and probably won't be playing at a theater near you anytime soon.

But the environmental horror story it recounts may be already: hydraulic fracturing (fracking)--a radically destructive method of extracting natural gas--is happening all over the country, from California to Wyoming (on the edge of Yellowstone) to Texas to Florida to Tennessee to Virginia to Pennsylvania.

If you're a New York City resident, like me, you, too, have a lot to worry about.

Director Josh Fox began the investigations that led to Gasland after getting an offer to lease his land in Pennsylvania for gas drilling.

First he hears of ominous effects in nearby towns, including water that has turned flammable since drilling began.

Then he sets out across the country--making a real-life, blacker-than-black comedy/horror road movie.

He witnesses many drinking water-lighting shows, learns of people living in homes that could explode, and suffering the effects of toxic air and toxic water, hears about company officials that visit those whose water they've ruined, assuring them the water's safe but refusing to drink it, and delves into the science and politics of Fracking.

Fracking works by injecting millions of gallons of water, along with 80 to 300 tons of chemicals, vertically into a gas well or horizontally into an area that couldn't have been drilled before, to fracture shale, releasing natural gas.

Thanks to the Bush/Cheney Energy Policy Act of 2005 (known as the Halliburton Loophole), the natural gas extraction industry is now exempt from the Safe Water Drinking Act. The chemical stews they use are considered "proprietary," and not subject to any kind of regulation.

An EPA official speaking to Fox off the record tells him, "We're not permitted as a government agency to answer your legitimate question."

A bill to overturn the exemption--the Fracturing Responsibility and Awareness of Chemicals Act--has been introduced in both houses of Congress, as S. 1215 and H. 2766, but languishes in committee.

We need to do our best to make sure it passes.

For information about the film, the issue, how close you live to fracking sites, and ways of helping to stop it, check out:

gaslandthemovie.com

Through 2012, you can catch Gasland on HBO; the DVD will be out in December.