I dig that.

Anyway, here’s the page for our conversation:

The competitive advantage of hiring artists, A conversation with Chris Ashworth

Despite the specificity of the title, we hit a bunch of topics in that hour of chatting. Listen in and hear me:

• railing against sick days
• pleading with businesses to question the rules of their workplace
• ranting about pricing your work
• wondering whether your art can be better instead of cheaper
• hollering “F permission”

and

• making my case for how Star Trek, positronic brains, human evolution and racism all relate to hiring.

It is therefore with mild horror that I now realize at least a handful of people are actually, um, reading this blog. I remain (intentionally) ignorant as to exactly how many times the server is spitting this text across the Internet, but blogs I respect and admire have done me the kindness of putting in a good word with their readership, so I must assume a few people are at least giving it a shot.

To you adventurous new readers I say hello, welcome, lovely to have you here, and if I may I’d like to introduce you to the rules and principles by which I sculpt this blog.

Rule 1: HOLY CRAP I HAVE NO RULE NUMBER ONE I DON’T EVEN KNOW IF I HAVE A CONSISTENT TOPIC

Not even a consistent topic? Not even. Or to put it another way:

This blog has a location, not a name.

Somewhat unfortunately, since it doesn’t have a name, the location becomes the name. (Location: ChrisAshworth.org Name: Uhhhhhhh…that blog on ChrisAshworth.org, aka “Chris Ashworth’s blog”).

Nice work, douche. Can’t you name it and put the focus on your topic instead?

Um, well, you have a great point, but again: I wasn’t expecting you to actually be here reading this. I didn’t install Wordpress because I had a topic, I installed it because I needed somewhere to respond.

I do stuff on the Internet. Sometimes I need a place to do it. Result: website. I used to have photos hosted here. Used to have a resume here. Used to put grad school homework assignments up here. They got stale. They’re gone now. (With one exception.)

This blog has no name because it has no theme. No theme except: junk I’ve been a-thinkin’ about.

Will I be writing about theater, small business, marketing and those other things that might have brought you here? Yes. I’m face-deep in all those things right now, and will undoubtedly need a place to explore more ideas on those topics.

But just so’s ya know, you’re liable to run into other stuff around here too. Software design, or politics, or personal grooming, or, hell, the intersection of politics and personal grooming.

I’m not trying to scare you off. God forbid. I’m totally stoked you’re here. I can’t wait to hear your thoughts. The greatest part of blogging is that I already disagree with half the stuff I’ve written before. Smart people called me out on things I got wrong.

All I wanna do is let you know: I’m not locking this thing down to one theme. I can’t do that. I can’t make stuff like that. Sorting my energy into themes just kills me. It kills me that when I went off to grad school for computers, everyone thought I’d given up theater. I wasn’t giving them the category they understood, so my life in theater, as they understood it, was dead. I hated that. That urge to force people and topics into a category. Their eyes would glaze over, and their categories would slice right through my life, and leave me in two pieces. I think that’s why this blog has no name. Names are powerful, and important, and manifestly necessary. But what makes them powerful and important and necessary is how they change and capture and fence in an idea. It’s very useful to fence something in, except when it isn’t. Sometimes the cage kills the thing you’re caging.

So welcome to this blog, a place where this guy named Chris does some writing. I’m completely thrilled you’re here. I can’t wait to talk to you. I just can’t tell you what we’ll talk about, because I honestly don’t know.

Robi is a unique human being. It’s really hard to describe the guy. When Robi looks at the world, he sees things you and I don’t see. I’ll give you an example in the form of a single web page:

http://www.robimookerjee.com/arsgratia/mustard.htm

Yeah, right? Crazy as hell. But also strangely revelatory.

He also once spent an idle moment sketching me a coat of arms. It’s not that I’d asked for a coat of arms, it’s just that this is the sort of thing Robi does in his spare time:

[Initial sketch for the arms of Duke Smashworth the Cammervoltaic, of the Space Duchy of Sass.]

As he described it:

Cito maturum, cito putridum: Quickly ripe, quickly rotten. A caution against wasteful and undue haste, a wise maxim for a Duchy so intimately involved with the politics of empire. Originated in reference to the Duchy’s renowned software-development caste, whose diligent and rigorous testing protocols are the stuff of legend. Not that they are slow, by any means. Rumour has it they once made the kessel subroutine run in less than twelve parsecs.

Anyway, Robi does a lot of stuff, and he does a lot of it very well. But the one thing he does better than anything is write. I mean, I know a lot of good writers, but Robi is the kind of luminous talent who proves to the world that there is such a thing as “talent”, and that you don’t have it.

The trouble with telling you this is that I can’t really support it with evidence; casual descriptions of Space Duchy’s aside, I don’t know of any public Robi writing I can show you.

I know it because I went to the same college, and that college has a private forum for students and alumni. On this forum Robi has quietly published dozens and dozens of stunning stories, essays, and unclassifiable compositions.

But the treasures are all locked behind a private wall, and Robi, despite the incessant pesterings of his college tribe, is not yet publicly published.

Well, Mr. Mookerjee, I’m calling you out: it’s time to get real. It’s time to get published. And no, I don’t care if you’ve already “tried” to get published. Whatever that idea means to you is wrong. I know this because you are not published.

Somewhere in this world is a company that will create high quality paper books fit for a man of discerning taste. That company probably has a web page. And if that company does not print-on-demand, but instead requires a traditional up-front payment for the run, then I direct your attention to several dozen rabid fans who would very likely contribute to the up-front costs. At least in the form of a pre-order. (And by the way, how did you get the power of leveraging several dozen rabid fans? By publishing your stuff free on a protected piece of the Internet. So: reconsider that no-blogging rule you’ve set for yourself.)

The age of needing a company to publish music, text, software, or other artwork is over, man. The barrier to “making” is now lower than at any other time in history. If you want your thing made, it’s your fault if it’s not.

You know, in terms of business models, just about anything beats theater:

The product can not be mass-produced.

At best, you can replicate it a few hundred seats at a time. Maaaybe a few thousand. But as soon as you digitize it, transmit it, or otherwise pull the audience away from the performer, it’s not theater anymore.

The product must be made fresh for each purchase.

Sure, you’re not making it from scratch unless you’re doing improv. But the product is a live event, and live events don’t fit in bottles, stay fresh under heat lamps, or last beyond the first serving. And making the product fresh each time isn’t even close to a mindless task, so each time you make it you need lots of highly trained people on hand.

The cost of making the product is extremely high.

Typical production costs cover a large, purpose-built room, lots of expensive equipment, scores of educated staff (half of whom are typically shipped in from out of state, because apparently New York is the only state that has staff qualified to create this product), and truly atrocious waste (how much raw material goes into a landfill after every regional theater production?).

The company can not sell the product at a high price…

The customer gets nothing tangible for their money¹. All they get is an experience. Can an experience command a high price? Sure, if it’s extreme.

• YES: space tourism, rock star concerts, high profile sporting events, elite prostitution.
• NO: movies, local cover bands, museum visits, theater performances.

…and yet the customer can not purchase the product for a low price.

Even if tickets are 2 bucks a pop, the show is not cheap. I’ll pay 2 bucks for a piece of candy and it doesn’t matter if it sucks ’cause I’m done with it in 2 minutes and I move on with my life. If the new “Post-Post-Modern Deconstructionist Christmas Carol…on Ice” sucks, that’s 2 hours of my life I can’t get back.

The quality of the product is highly unpredictable.

Perhaps no other product has a wider range of quality, from “sublime” to “unbelievable waste of time”. Moreover, there’s almost no way to know what you’re going to get—the brand of the venue is no guarantee, nor are practically any other traditional consumer signals except word of mouth. As McDonald’s will tell you, that’s no way to get lots of people in the door. Hell, even two different nights of the same show often produce wildly different experiences, depending on who shows up to watch and what mood they’re in.

The product has low demand—and probably always will.

Theater does not command much of the cultural mindscape. That’s fair; nothing gets to claim a cultural stake without earning it. Of course, America has proven that the cultural battlefield is basically the same as the economic battlefield, so waning economic leverage leads to waning cultural leverage and vice versa. It’s a nice little feedback loop that means, barring changes in human nature or laws banning the more economically viable art forms, theater will forever be a niche.

 
In light of all this it’s pretty obvious why theater is a non-profit endeavor, and why the Angry White Guy often argues that Theater is Not a Widget.

I’m not saying theater should be a widget, but man, this is a seriously challenging monetary model. With a model like this its almost a miracle we have any theaters left in a recession.

What should be our relationship to money in the theater? I think most of us would like to make a modest living and have health insurance. We certainly don’t get in to theater because we care about making a lot of money. But can we reasonably expect to meet even those modest goals under a business model like this? I mean, if I asked you to come up with a worse business model than that, it’d be pretty hard: high monetary costs, high temporal costs, high waste, low income, few efficiencies, an inability to scale, little consistency, little demand.

Some of what makes theater a bad business is, alas, also fundamental to what makes it theater. But surely it’s not a completely lost cause. Can we imagine a theater run in any other way? What if we start off with the assumption that a theater can’t make money from its art? ² How would we create a theater that runs under this assumption? Could such a theater exist? Can it be made economically robust and artistically excellent?

If I may borrow Nick Keenan’s rallying call (and his GIF):

1 Exception: dinner theater. But that chimera has historically been a dead end for both the art and the food.

2 I’m not saying I think theaters should stop selling tickets. I’m advocating for a thought experiment.

But how? The answer is probably: words. The marketplace of ideas has shown strong year-over-year growth in the “musical” and “visual arts” mediums, but let’s face it, friend: Written and spoken language remains the number 1 preferred method to transfer a thought pattern from your head into my head.

It’s a great time for idea-sharers. “Blogs”, “tweets”, “eye-ems”, “face book messages”, the “online forum”, “electronic mail”, “web pages”, and more! And if you’re old, you might remember such classic technologies as “typewriters”, or “pencils”.

Lots of ideas, and lots of ways to share them. Great! But also: crushingly oversaturated.

So make your words count! Learn the fine art of editing! Don’t know how? It’s easy! Our FREE modern guidelines show you how:

Step 1: Don’t say anything. If you have nothing to say, don’t say it! You’re already half way to whatever award it is they give to great editors.

Step 2: Wait and see if someone else will say it. They probably will, leaving you—who cleverly said nothing—with more time for the good life.

Step 3: Say it on Twitter. Okay. You’ve got a really great idea and you think the world should know. I guarantee you it will fit in 140 characters. Force yourself to find a way. The world will wait.

Step 4: Fine, use 2 Tweets if you really need to.

Step 5: Still here? Right! Then you have an idea that’s both interesting and has depth. I like your style! Now you can move on to a blog post or some other, more verbose instrument.

Step 6: Delete, delete, delete. Also: delete. Just because you need more than 140 characters to say it doesn’t mean you get free rein. Please remember the old quote: “I wrote a long paper because I didn’t have time to write a short one.”

Step 7: Climb the bandwidth ladder only as necessary. Blog post too confining? Then maybe you need a whole website to communicate your idea. Still not enough to contain your boundless creativity? It might be time to start your own The Show.

The point is this: make every word fight for its life. If you can say it in less, don’t say it in more.

I’ll probably read this tomorrow and wish it wasn’t so long.

Working backward:

• American popular opinion is driven by the media.
• The media is dominated by image.
• A candidate’s appearance is their primary image.
• A candidate’s appearance is, briefly, under the complete control of the person who cuts their hair.

Somewhere in America are a handful of men and women, holding scissors and shears, that could single-handedly reshape the American political landscape in under two seconds without the use of a weapon.

I’ve never actually done it. But I often recognize moments when it would be enticing to deny truth, to turn against reality, and fashion a temporary illusion for the naive or uninformed.

A lie is easy. A lie is physically a very easy thing to accomplish. Air goes in, air comes out, and essentially that’s it. Physically speaking, a lie practically doesn’t even exist–just a little vibrating air in a whole soup of the same.

Think about it this way: what would it take to measure a lie? I don’t mean a lie detector. Sure, humans give all these little biophysical signals when they fib. But a lie detector doesn’t measure the lie, it measures the scared and sweating liar. What would it take to measure the lie? Can you make a box to do that? A gauge?

A lie is an abstract creature. A state of crafty symbolism. A lie is a combination of two things: a signal which carries information and an intent which crafts that signal in such a way that it is known to be false by the sender. For a lie to have any recognizable existence at all, a very great many things have to be already in place. Entire systems of thought. “I didn’t take a cookie” only gets the chance to be a lie in a world where there are cookies and people who take them. And while the concept of taking is arguably not so terribly complex, I propose that the concept of a cookie is. Entailing, as it does, such knowledge as why a cookie is a cookie and why a lamp or a fox or a funeral is not. So the creation of a system in which a lie might exist is remarkably involved. But given that system, the lie itself is simple, and in and of itself, painless. No lightning strikes you dead upon committing a lie. That’s not the sort of cause and effect relationship that’s set up in this world.

In a system sophisticated enough to contain lamps and funerals and cookies and people who steal them, the integrity of information counts for a lot. Lies may not cause the skies to turn to fire, or the mountains to crumble, but they can set off an avalanch that buries you just the same. In a complex system, where information and the relationships of the world are what makes it tick, a lie is like a silent stick of dynamite in a deep bank of snow; it may do nothing…or it may set off the avalanch that buries towns. Compulsive liars are the pyromaniacs of this communicating species of ours. They walk around with white paper gunpowder poppers, throwing handfuls of snap-popping falsehoods at snowbanks. For the thrill.

It’s compulsive. But why? The compulsion must lie somewhere in the ease with which the universe may be shifted. Have you ever looked out from a cliff that had no railing? The bait that entices you to step over is the same bait that causes the compulsive lie. Have you ever sat across from a casual acquaintence and wondered what would happen if you leaned over and gave them a big kiss on the mouth? The extreme proximity of the object and the simplicity with which the action could be carried out create a mysterious contrast with the opposite extremity of the consequences. I mean, you’ve never actually jumped over the edge. It’d be easy, but it’d also kill you. So, near as I can figure it, compulsive liars go for lots of little jumps.

Try it. Give it a little nudge. You’ll find the cart will continue to roll onward, spinning as it goes, until it delivers the push-bar back into your palm with hardly so much as a wobble. And they can do that consistently. As if they were designed for it. As if they have been waiting all their cart lives to break out of the unbearable monotony of straight-line trajectories. Don’t try that at the Kroger, friend. That’s asking for a cart through the canned beans.*

In sum, IKEA shopping carts may well be designed by the Swedish air defense engineering corps, which if true encourages us to remain on good terms with this sleeping superpower.

*The bean stack, as it were.