Um. First off – please go vote on the Facebook Site Governance Proposal. I know I sound like a wackadoodle sometimes, but as I’ve mentioned, FB is the world’s sixth largest country after Brazil. And even though business people seem to think that letting users set policy will doom FB to failure, I disagree. If they play their cards right they will be setting up a new model to replace the nation-state and even globalism as a means of social and political organization. As we move more fully into the information age, as economies become increasingly virtual, so too will government. Start learning how digital democracy will work now, or suffer the consequences later. A recent article in the New Yorker posed the question why Obama intervened with the auto industry in a way that he didn’t with finance. My non-wonk analysis is that the auto industry needs to be drastically retooled in a way that existing leaders would never do. The financial industry is already an  information-age-economy sector. They just need to learn not to be evil. But they’re already looking to the future.

Speaking of the future and the past and re-envisioning, etc. etc. I finally posted the lecture that I gave at JTS a few months ago on Vimeo. Check it out here.

It is called Envisioning Contemporary Jewish Theatre and it is a lecture I have at a conference on Jews, Theatre and Performance in an intercultural world. I compared The Wooster Group’s HAMLET to the Folksbiene Yiddish Theatre’s production of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s GIMPEL TAM and explained why The Wooster Group piece used a more “Jewish” mode of construction. I go on to discuss particularism and globalism, re-envisioning culturally specific theater and moving beyond narrativity in performance. It is about 20 minutes long.