Ffffff Theatre!

Some entertainment options worth considering in NYC, especially for the politically-inclined, to keep you occupied while I am busy offline with a big project for a while (forgive me if I’m unresponsive):

•FILMS: SmashCut CineFest features six short dramatic films with liberty themes, Tue., Oct. 24, 2017 from 6:30-9:30 (including post-screening Q&A). You can get VIP tickets here while they last.

•FERGUSON: Ferguson is a staged reenactment, not based on media spin but using the actual witness transcripts, of the events that sparked riots near St. Louis in 2014 and arguments about race and policing thereafter. Scroll down at the right here to see your options including buying a ticket for the initial New York City run.

•THE FIGHT: Playwright Jonathan Leaf tackles another politically volatile moment in history with his new play The Fight about sometimes-ugly schisms in the mid-twentieth-century feminist movement.

•THE FLEA: In November and December, the small but talented playwrights group The Pool puts on productions such as Lynn Rosen’s Washed Up on the Potomac at the Flea Theater (20 Thomas St.). I don’t know if they have actual political connections, but I’ve got photographic evidence the group’s launch party was in a hip-looking apartment.

•THE FOUNTAINHEAD: I can only imagine what the Toneelgroep Amsterdam is going to do to reinvent Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead as a deconstructionist stage production at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, but I will risk finding out.

•THE FUTURE: I will also one day soon enough host real-world events of my own again. In the meantime look for my weekly columns on Splice Today. Eventually, I will reemerge with that ten-part, 10,000-word blog essay I promised to put on ToddSeavey.com and more. (And of course: please read my book.)

Better Luck Next Quarter-Century

Well, the first person I saw sing professionally in New York City after I moved here, Chris Cornell, has died (he, along with Soundgarden, was opening for Guns N' Roses at MSG, within months of the time I walked all the way from downtown Seattle to the real Sound Garden sculpture, which was probably rock-inspired foolhardiness in retrospect).

It's odd that we lost the "Blackstar" singer (Bowie), the "sun day or night" singer (Prince), and the "Black Hole Sun" singer (Cornell) in such short succession.

In other timeloop-like reminders of the 90s, I see

(A) the guy who founded Fox News back in that decade, Roger Ailes, has also died, rendering still more obsolete my insider perspective on what an insane company he built,

(B) Twin Peaks, at one time not so long ago the weirdest part of pop culture, restarts this coming Sunday,

(C) a more concerted effort to get NYC Brown alums of the 90s to socialize is apparently afoot,

(D) all the naive post-Cold War dreams of young political ideologues from those days about making society nicer or at least in some way principled are probably falling apart before our eyes, and

(E) as of this week (as teased in a Flash story) we also know that Geoff Johns, who got his start writing for DC Comics back in that decade and has since become DC's co-president, is going to write a rather self-indulgent-sounding comics miniseries called Doomsday Clock, apparently pitting dark Dr. Manhattan from Watchmen against optimistic Superman and perhaps against DC time/continuity itself.

It's as if everything that happened between the last episode of Twin Peaks and the next one is a twenty-six-year "wash," if you ask me (and for me it all went by like a busy long weekend, or perhaps a dreamlike timeloop), so maybe I'll shut up for a while -- or at least avoid online sniping and stick to longer, more thoughtful pieces (coming soon in real magazines, most likely) -- ones that take a more serious stab at increasing the odds of the next quarter-century or so being sane. Yeah, well, we'll see how it goes.

Seavey on Refinery29

The fashion site Refinery29.com did a two-minute video (posted Jan. 20, 2017) of people of varied political persuasions getting along well enough to have a beer, and I’m just pleased that I’m identified as a “libertarian anarcho-capitalist” in my brief appearance near the end. (Read more about that in my book, needless to say.)