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What the Dramatist Knows About Monsters

I sold my first paid byline to a Lincoln, Nebraska, newspaper at the age of ten. That was 1975. In the fifty-one years since, I have continued to be paid to construct figures that audiences will find frightening, or sympathetic, or contemptible, or laughable, on schedule, in plays and musicals and screenplays and novels and podcast scripts and editorial work. My Dramatists Guild membership dates from 1984. My MFA is from the Oscar Hammerstein II Center for Graduate Theatre Studies at Columbia University. A publishing house I founded in the same year I sold the first byline has operated without interruption since. The inventory exists for a single reason: the labor of figure-construction is something I know from inside the work, and the working-dramatist’s perspective on that labor is the perspective from which my new book is written.

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Seeing Around Corners

The phrase “seeing around corners” gets tossed around boardrooms and strategy meetings as though it were a compliment, a kind of secular beatification for the executive or thinker who got there first. But the phrase deserves closer scrutiny, because what it actually describes is a discipline, and one that most people refuse to practice because the conclusions it produces are uncomfortable.

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Your Three-Year-Old Already Knows the Brand Name

Watch a three-year-old in a grocery store. Watch her eyes when you turn into the cereal aisle. Her gaze is not scanning the shelves the way you scan them, evaluating prices and nutritional labels and unit costs. A search is underway. The child already knows what she wants, and she knows it by name, and she knows the name because a screen taught it to her before she could read the word printed on the box. The box appears in her sightline. A finger goes up. The name comes out of her mouth. You have just witnessed the end product of a commercial pedagogy that has been operating in American media for more than fifty years, and the child has no idea it happened to her.

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The Rental Life: What Happens When You Own Nothing and They Own You

In July 2009, Amazon reached into the Kindle devices of thousands of customers and deleted copies of George Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm. The company had discovered that the third-party publisher selling those editions lacked the rights to distribute them in the United States. Amazon issued refunds. Then it erased the books. A high school student in Michigan lost his annotated copy mid-assignment. A class-action lawsuit followed. Amazon’s CEO called the decision “stupid, thoughtless, and painfully out of line with our principles.” The company settled and promised not to do it again, unless a court ordered it, or unless the company determined it was necessary to protect consumers from malicious code, or unless the consumer failed to keep paying.

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Politicizing a Pandemic Presidency

The coronavirus, the rising threat of Covid-19, is nobody’s fault. Viruses are wild. Viruses happen. As long as humans keep eating animals, we will have viruses transferring from the animal world to the realm of the human being, but let there be no doubt that the “Wuhan Virus” and the “Democrat Hoax” and the “China Virus” will, very soon, be known as “The Democrat Pandemic” if Donald Trump has his way naming himself a “War President” as he leaves the cities to rot, and fold, while he claims victory in doing nothing.

Donald Trump is, without pause or preservation, “An Enemy of the People” in the truest possible manner as warned in writing by Henrik Ibsen in 1882.

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The 2017 Oscars Debacle Proves No Heretical or Heuristic Difference Between Winning and Losing

The 2017 Oscars will be forever remembered as a debacle over naming the “Best Picture” in a mixup that was more human than mechanical, and for that pleasure, I’m grateful. We continue to prove, even in our dearest moments, we are not beyond the touch of the fallible, and that we are mortally are bound to fail — by proxy of The Gods — for even tempting to create beauty over form, and meaning over function.

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On Branding, Own the Generic: Why I Became “David Boles” on the Internet

If you spend any time doing business on the internet — “Branding Yourself” — is an important part of the process even if it seems shameful and unseemly and selfish: Enjoy it! It’s what you’ve become by being here!

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Call me a Nigger from the North

If you are easily offended by history, and the muscle memory mnemonics of words like — nigger — then you should not read the rest of this article. Over the many decades we’ve been publishing original work online, one word keeps popping back up for examination in various memes. Yes, that word is — “the N-word” — and we just call it like it is here, because that’s how Nigger has been used in the context of life beyond the Uncanny Valley.

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BUY NOW: Best of David Boles, Blogs: Vol. 6 (2015)

If it’s December, it’s time to ask for your help again in supporting this blog by purchasing our newest conflation — Best of David Boles, Blogs: Volume 6 (2015) — to help cover our yearly bandwidth and server costs! You may read some of the best writing over the past year in this book from David Boles, Janna Sweenie and a newly unearthed gem from the forever magnificent Howard Stein!

BUY NOW!

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What Makes a Neighborhood? Who Creates a City?

Way back in 2001, I interviewed Tass Michos — Director of Photography for the “Death to Smoochy” movie starring Edward Norton and Robin Williams — for eyepiece magazine, the official publication of the Guild of British Camera Technicians; and while the interview didn’t start off well, we did meet at the fancied Union Square Cafe for our power lunch, and the best part of the meeting was that the Guild was picking up the tab for what turned out to be a discomforting meal in more ways than one.

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