Or: “Holy Frijoles. Five years?”

Or: “So THAT just happened.”

Or: “In a few hours the circle closes and I am going to yell about it from my little rooftop because although it ain’t really all that huge — wow it sure feels huge to me.”

Warning: personal story ahead. And yeah, it’s kind of long. [...]

There’s interesting stuff brewing in Baltimore right now. I’d like to commend to your attention two things in particular:

Number 1

The Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, a world-class symphony with a world-class conductor, is taking a sledgehammer to their own pedestal.

Filed under:

Increasing Surface Area
You Don’t Have to Be Small to do this Stuff
Your Immediate Neighborhood (Yours) [...]

It’s early Saturday morning, my wife just went to work, and residing in my mental register are about eight things that take drastically higher priority over writing a blog post.

So heeeeyyyeeeeeere I am. Top of the morning to you. I’ve got a date with the farmers’ market in about an hour, so let’s [...]

A few days ago I tweeted the following assertion:

There are many glorious TED talks, but this may be the most glorious.

I don’t mind telling you: I wept at my desk when I watched this video.

I took little time to share the video on Twitter, and it was not much later when my friend Jen Wang [...]

A few days ago Devon Smith announced she’s been working on quantifying how well LORT theaters use Twitter.

This is neat. I like this idea, and in the spirit of public feedback about it, here’s, uh, some public feedback:

The Metrics I Generally Dig

@mentions — Measuring mentions captures something about both re-tweets and conversations. Both [...]

Ever since jotting down a few observations on theater’s crappy business model, I’ve found myself mildly obsessed with finding a solution to the problem of funding theater.

Why?

I’m not sure. Because I love it, I guess. Because although I’m not convinced the arts are strictly necessary, I am convinced they’re one way we make [...]

99 seats asks:

We’re not all a bunch of dirty hippies out here in the arts world. I know that. There are conservatives, libertarians, LaRouchites in the arts world. So, maybe, your political philosophy is that the government shouldn’t be involved in the arts. [...] The thing I hate the most about the conservatives in the [...]

The Everyman Theatre is one of the best theaters in Baltimore. They make great art. They consistently sell out their shows. Everyman gets big props.

They also just climbed on board the Twitter wagon.

Now, I’ve got nothing but love for Everyman. And there’s nothing really wrong about how they’re using Twitter. [...]

Yesterday I learned of a thing called MetaFilter. Someone in the MetaFilter community subsumed my recent blog posts into a MetaPost about theater economics.

The ensuing conversation is great fun to read, although a little difficult to follow; coherency suffers in the age of aggregated essays. Clarity also suffers: “Is this sentence addressed to [...]

Since my recent post arguing that artists should not receive public funds for the purpose of making art, I’ve been thinking a lot about how theater artists earn money.

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 [...]