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3/3/15 21:49![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
owlectomyHello from San Francisco! From, to be precise, my not actually very comfortable little hostel bunk. I have done many things!
Most recently I have seen "Mr. Burns: A Post-Electric Play," which I very much wanted to see based on Nick Mamatas's review but didn't realize until I saw an ad for it on a bus that I could in fact go see it.
It begins not long after a kind of apocalypse, seemingly started off by a plague that left too few people able to staff nuclear plants, leading to meltdowns. The survivors, in between trying to find news of their families and information about the nuclear danger, start to piece together, from memories, an episode of The Simpsons.
I remember when the 2011 earthquake and tsunami caused the nuclear crisis in Fukushima - how the English media was at least 24 hours behind the Japanese media and often altogether wrong, how the Japanese media wasn't doing much better given the PR and ass-covering coming out of the government and TEPCO. And I was scrambling to learn the necessary vocabulary, and dig up every decent news source I could find, not because there was any danger to me personally, not because there was anything useful I could do with this information, but because the question of how bad things could really get wouldn't let me go. So this play hit at those fears for me in a very visceral way. (I am not sure that I am actually against nuclear power even now, just because global warming is a bigger danger, but I think it was pretty smart on the playwright's part to slip just enough information about how things could go wrong into a fun pop-culturey post-apocalyptic play.)
I liked its depiction of the theater world, such as it is after the apocalypse - how technical discussions are inevitably also aesthetic discussions. I liked the "commercials" that provide a window on memories of an easier life. But mostly I think I appreciated it as a play about transformative works. How the society that survives moves from memory and authenticity - things which it will never be able to totally recapture - towards repurposing the raw materials of 20th/21st century pop culture and reprocessing them into a way to tell its own stories and process its traumas. I can't see a play like that without thinking of fanfiction, of vidding, of every meme that mutates endlessly as it spreads across Tumblr. The fan community reprocessed The Winter Soldier into a story that I liked so much that I was disappointed by the actual movie, just like I imagine the real "Cape Feare" would look irrelevant and incomprehensible to one of the hypothetical viewers of the reconstructed mystery-play version. This is the play I'd want to show the courts, when transformative works come up for discussion.
Most recently I have seen "Mr. Burns: A Post-Electric Play," which I very much wanted to see based on Nick Mamatas's review but didn't realize until I saw an ad for it on a bus that I could in fact go see it.
It begins not long after a kind of apocalypse, seemingly started off by a plague that left too few people able to staff nuclear plants, leading to meltdowns. The survivors, in between trying to find news of their families and information about the nuclear danger, start to piece together, from memories, an episode of The Simpsons.
I remember when the 2011 earthquake and tsunami caused the nuclear crisis in Fukushima - how the English media was at least 24 hours behind the Japanese media and often altogether wrong, how the Japanese media wasn't doing much better given the PR and ass-covering coming out of the government and TEPCO. And I was scrambling to learn the necessary vocabulary, and dig up every decent news source I could find, not because there was any danger to me personally, not because there was anything useful I could do with this information, but because the question of how bad things could really get wouldn't let me go. So this play hit at those fears for me in a very visceral way. (I am not sure that I am actually against nuclear power even now, just because global warming is a bigger danger, but I think it was pretty smart on the playwright's part to slip just enough information about how things could go wrong into a fun pop-culturey post-apocalyptic play.)
I liked its depiction of the theater world, such as it is after the apocalypse - how technical discussions are inevitably also aesthetic discussions. I liked the "commercials" that provide a window on memories of an easier life. But mostly I think I appreciated it as a play about transformative works. How the society that survives moves from memory and authenticity - things which it will never be able to totally recapture - towards repurposing the raw materials of 20th/21st century pop culture and reprocessing them into a way to tell its own stories and process its traumas. I can't see a play like that without thinking of fanfiction, of vidding, of every meme that mutates endlessly as it spreads across Tumblr. The fan community reprocessed The Winter Soldier into a story that I liked so much that I was disappointed by the actual movie, just like I imagine the real "Cape Feare" would look irrelevant and incomprehensible to one of the hypothetical viewers of the reconstructed mystery-play version. This is the play I'd want to show the courts, when transformative works come up for discussion.