howzat.ca – Canadian Cricket Blog

The Theatre Projects Manitoba production of [i]The Moonlight Sonata of Beethoven Blatz[/i] has been closed for four days as of this post, but its never too late to discuss something, so lets have at it.

The play is Mennonite author Armin Weibe’s first foray to the stage. He’s been authoring for some time, but this is the first of his stories that wanted to be a play. Alright, works for me.

The story is of a young, childless Mennonite couple (Obram and his wife Susch Kehler) who bring a piano and a Russian musician named Beethoven Blatz into their home. The reasons why they have this piano are a bit thin, apparently it fell off the back of a truck and Obram brought it home. I’m not sure if that has the same connotation in a small Mennonite town as it does where I grew up. If it does, it doesn’t explain anything else in the rest of the play, so I’ll just let the matter be.

So Blatz moves in with the Kehler’s and the plan is he will teach Susch how to play the piano. I’m not sure why, she never seems to express any explicit desire to learn to play the piano. Or maybe she does, but it doesn’t matter because the instrument needs repair.

Blatz also has that job, which he manages to accomplish at a pace reminicient of continental drift. The Kehlers appear to cut Blatz some slack because he isn’t quite all there, having suffered some degree of trauma during the Russian Revolution. He lives in their little home for months and months playing the opening to the Moonlight Sonata.

At least he does whenever one of the Kehlers isn’t busy banging out Chopsticks, which happens. A lot.

There’s also the distraction of a man in a dress coutresy of a poision ivy infection. This is based on an incident in the playwrite’s own family history.

So, the story finally gets rolling around the end of the first act when there is some confusion about what “tuning a piano” actually means during a conversation between Blatz and Obrum. That and Susch believes the joshing of her lesbian midwife to be actual advice on how she should live her life.

This sets up the second act to be how I would expect a Mennonite version of Three’s Company to play out. But not before the appearance of the Brummtopp right at the end of the first act.

For those not in the know, the Brummtopp is a noisemaker which Mennonites would use to ring-in the new year.

In a talk a couple of days after the night I saw the production, Weibe said that some Mennonites were not permitted to use musical instruments, but the Brummtopp was considered a “noise maker” not an “instrument” so they would go around “not playing” this thing. Sounds very bureaucratic.

Anyway, without knowing this, the last minute of the first act appears a clumsy way to send the audience off to an intermission. It kind of has to be seen to be believed, but it stands in very stark contrast to everything that was seen before it. Especially since it involved the lesbian midwife dressed in drag. But I guess that helps balance off the man in the dress from earlier.

The play marches on in the second half. Susch’s belly shows more and more (a handy device to move time forward on the stage). Blatz stays busy not fixing the piano. Obrum is largely absent, busy at work trying to earn enough money to build a bigger house. I don’t really remember what the lesbian midwife was up to, she made her move in the first act and didn’t really do anything.

Ok, I tell I lie, she tries to destroy the piano with an ax towards the end of the play. But that dramatic tension is diffused by way of Susch giving birth. Nobody saw that coming, right?

Apparently the child “looks just like his mother” although I’m gonna guess that a decade or so down the road, there might be some whispers around town.

I’m not sure I took away everything from this play that I could have. I suffer from a lack of being rasied speaking low German, which made it difficult for me to follow some of the dialogue. Some of it was explained afterwards, but it still seems like I missed something.

The audience the night I was there would make a very strange population pyramid, should anyone ever be inclined to do such a thing. There was a large number of my classmates there, many (perhaps most) between 20 and 25 years of age. There were also many in attendance old enough to remember the cold war. It appeared to appeal more to the latter crowd.

Its been said (and I tend to agree) that Facebook and Twitter didn’t invent being stupid on the Internet, but it they sure have made it easier.  From time to time there are reports of someone getting fired from their job because of Facebook.  The ICC has decided to ban players and staff from using Twitter during World Cup matches over concerns of match fixing.  It also saves players from making spur of the moment statements for which they later must appologize. 

Pitfalls aside, Facebook is wildly popular and Twitter is carving out some sort of market for itself, so it makes some sense that companies are looking to use both services to deliver messages to their target audience.  It certainly seems a good idea given that previous efforts had flash banners offering users the chance to shoot the kangaroo and win an iPod.

One of the problems with the shoot the kangaroo banners were that they were barely (if at all) targeted, particularly when a site used an ad serving service.  Ads for sneakers would run on car forums, car ads would run on websites for parenting tips and ads targeting new parents whould show up on sites with sports betting advice.  Geo-location made things a bit better, at least you’d see car ads for dealers in your area, but content-wise, they were still all over the map.

If there is anything good to be said about these flash banners, it is only that they were a step up from email ads which really only advertised heavily discounted prescription medicines that enlarge a portion of the male anatomy that isn’t the Adam’s apple.

But Facebook and Twitter make it easy to quickly target a message to an audience that actually wants to hear it.  Mostly because people actively join groups or otherwise self identify as being interested in a certain product or service.  It is a little easier with Facebook than Twitter, fan groups have a bit more permanance than hash tags, but the people are there, waiting to be identified.

Its at this point where approaches get a little different in how an organization will use Facebook and Twitter.  The most immediately obvious difference is that Twitter messages top out at 140 characters, Facebook will handle much longer blocks of text.  More space equals more message, but too much message and people stop reading.

Very closely related to this issue of character limit are URLs included in messages.  With the tiny limit of 140 characters, URLs in Twitter messages are often listed with a shortening service which uses an alpha-numeric scheme very similar to what is produced when a cat gets the chance to walk across a keyboard.  I don’t like them, but I guess they are a necessary evil.

But the greatest difference between the two social networking services is Facebook’s ability to have pictures.  People like photos and Facebook serves them up.  I’m not sure of the wisdom of having all of your embarrassing moments available for everyone to see, but people do it.  It will be very interesting to see how this influences muckraking come time for all of Facebook’s users to run for public office and head multi-national companies, it’s either going to make it easier or pointless.

But that’s an aside – the more immediate concern is using it to contact people to get them a message a company believes they want to hear.  I don’t have enough experience with either to offer a considered opinion, but I do have some impressions based on what I read and hear of the discussions others have regarding both.

Despite its flood of messages updating people on “critical” matters such as the contents of a tweeter’s mid-day meal, Twitter is apparently the ‘better’ tool for gathering information.  It seems Facebook is reserved for personal matters, but people relate to the ‘headline’ nature of Twitter enough to keep checking in. 

Either way, it appears to take an obscene amount of work to have a social media presence that people continue to remain interested in.  To do it right means two-way communication with the audience and that takes a lot of time.  Twitter etiquette demands followers be acknowledged.  This really isn’t any different than before, it was always a courtesy to reply to unsolicited feedback.  Its just not there is a whole lot more of it because stamps cost money, clicking a follow link is free and easy.

Turns out blogging is easier when you remember your password. 

Anyway, back to it.  But first some breif words about self-publishing.

For anyone taking the time work at something creative, be it a book, album, movie – whatever – it has to be terribly disheartening to submit to a publisher only to be rejected.  I had the opportunity to hear Matt Duggan (author of Cherry Electra and other works) speak about a week ago, and he told the tale of taking two years to work on a piece only to have a publisher suggest that more work needed be done before it was ready to go to print.  I imagine it takes more than a bit of gumption to soldier on past that initial rejection, but he did and things seem to have worked out for him.

There are other options available, including self-publication.  Interestingly, not all of this self-publication is done for vanity’s sake (although that certainly still exists) and in some ways, self-publication today mirrors the way books were published in the past.  In fact (and by fact I mean it’s what currently is on Wikipedia) the list of self published authors reads like a whos-who of literary giants: Mark Twain, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Rudyard Kipling and many more.

Their reasons for self-publishing may be different than those of authors opting to foot the bill themselves these days, but in both cases authors are able to circumvent whatever the publishers consider as necessary to getting something printed.  This comes with both up- and down-sides.

On the up, books that appeal to a very narrow audience can see the light of day.  Take for instance A History of Canadian Cricket: An Immigrants Game? which author Patrick Adams has made available through print-on-demand publisher lulu.com.  This is just a guess, but the audience for this book is rather small and I could see how a publisher might balk at the opportunity to publish a book that may have trouble getting to its intended audience. 

Without self-publication, those in that target audience have to go without, never really knowing what it is they might happen to miss.  I’ve ordered myself a copy (although I only got around to it while writing this) because I’m interested in what Adams has to say.  I will be sure to get a review up once I’ve been able to read it.

As great as getting around the gatekeepers of the publishing world is, this is where the downside comes in.  It is entirely up to the author to produce a completly polished piece, and not all of them are capable of it.  Yeah, errors slip though on occasion (Ken Finkleman’s book Noah’s Turn has Janis Joplin’s name misspelled) but largely, the gatekeeping prevents absolute tragedies from making it into a book.  And this is where self-publishing really gets a bad, and perhaps mostly deserved, rep.  As long as you have the money, there is nobody there to say no.

Take for instance, William McGonagall who published this “gem”:

Beautiful Railway Bridge of the Silv’ry Tay!
Alas! I am very sorry to say
That ninety lives have been taken away
On the last Sabbath day of 1879,
Which will be remember’d for a very long time.

For as popular as his work has become, it is entirely because of how bad it is.  But I guess if you just want to see your name in print, things like that don’t matter.