Part of my work is setting up a local community theatre in my area of London and for part of this I'd been preparing a proposal to enter the CAFF Touring Lottery. CAFF (better known as the Canadian Association of Fringe Festivals) manages a network of Fringe festivals throughout Canada and the United States every year and for international entrants has a lottery to help with the Tour - which is an undertaking to do all or most of the Fringe Festivals on the circuit.
As a somewhat established Fringe playwright and director based here in the UK doing the CAFF Tour is something of a dream - you get to do something you're good at and enjoy doing on the other side of the Atlantic coast to coast at costs which favour comparably with the Edinburgh Fringe. That saying it's also arguably one of the toughest challenges in theatre (or theater), with much of the year spent touring covering long distances.
However sadly I don't think it's going to happen. We're well into April 2013 and there's no new information on the CAFF Touring Lottery 2014.
I was also recently asked at a meeting of local politicians 'Is this Fringe tour something for hairdressers?'
I'm hoping that, even if the Lottery doesn't happen that the network of Fringe festivals throughout Canada and the States survives and continues. It's something to be proud of. But I also fear a decline, which is part of the general cultural decline which has gone from some great movies, music and theatre to television game shows where you can find contestants asking 'Can I have an 'n' as in knife?'
We all know how being trans can cause us problems, but I'm also sure that I'm not alone in thinking that it's not just being trans which can cause us problems, but also being intelligent can cause us problems as well.
I have a theory that the demise of modern theatre and also modern culture has led to the development of more social divisions, the destructions of different subcultures and an increase in anti-social behaviour. Last week Greater Manchester Police announced that it will be treating attacks on punks, emos and goths as hate crimes. All of a sudden it's bad to be different but somehow socially acceptable to be an idiot.
It's okay to do things such as turn left at a right hand turn only intersection, trying to pay your bus fare with a credit card, and being unable to spell seven or eight letter words and in many cities the F-word is becoming more acceptable as a verbal punctuation mark.
The chickens are coming home to roost.
I feel this has come about partly because we've been taking short cuts and neglecting our education system. We've got to stop paying teachers the same as menial council workers and stop treating our kids and students like cannon fodder on a pre-destined path to wage enslavement.
We're approaching a time when the number of people aged 60 or over is starting to outnumber the rest of the population as baby boomers are approaching retirement age and like health care, we need to get our heads back round the concept of education being a basic human need and right - like water, sleep and oxygen - instead of being a privilege for the lucky ones who can afford it.
Where is the sense of someone spending years studying for a degree in a subject area or field only to become focussed on paying off debts and stuff when they graduate? You tell me.
It seems that in many places where you have welfare provisions these welfare provisions are becoming increasingly overburdened. In many cases people are becoming stuck on welfare because they are sick, disabled, or have varying degrees of physical or mental impairment. However it's also true to say that we have an increasing number of people who are stuck on welfare programs not because they're lazy but because they never received a proper education and lack the skills and knowledge which would make them more employable.
The other reason is that - and we do have to face facts here - television and the media have been successful in dumbing us down.
I came back to the UK from Poland at the end of 2005 after living there for 13 years. However six years later I can still find people on television who I don't know who they are, why they are on TV or how they came to be so well known. We have celebrity culture and reality television where we get to watch ordinary people doing ordinary things and this is what now passes for entertainment.
In fact not only has the media and television succeeded in dumbing us down, but it's also pretty good at promoting the cult of the idiot. Daytime television is awash with programmes with first name presenters such as 'Trisha', or Jerry Springer, Jeremy Kyle, Judge Judy, where we can be entertained by idiots getting themselves into stupid situations.
Television producers tell us that this is what viewers enjoy watching. Sure, just like Eskimos enjoy chewing fat because there's nothing else available north of the Arctic Circle.
It's like with the music industry. I remember back when cellphones first started becoming popular with their primitive ringtones because we still had fairly decent music. Now it seems that everyone has a smartphone or iPhone and much of what's produced as music sounds more like the primitive ringtones. Some of the songs I hear make me wince because of that tinny digital sound you get from either autotune or digitally editing the voice.
I feel that we've already gone way beyond the stage of meditation and introspection and that we're now at the crossroads where we get to choose between books and the beckoning horizon of new technology.
We are told that the new technology is better because it makes our lives easier. But chances are that the stats they're using have been computer generated and the voice is also a computer generated synthesized voice.
But this appears only to mean that there will be even less demanded from us, less effort, less thinking, and even more tolerance for stupidity and lack of effort. We are coming to a period where such qualities as compassion, empathy and understanding are seen as weaknesses and liabilities and I'm afraid that soon we're going to reach a point where intelligence and creativity are also going to be seen as weaknesses and liabilities.
At what cost all this technology? Our humanity? Isn't this where the costs start to outweigh the benefits?
What say you?
