Daisey Be-Dazement

I told my friend I was at a loss at how to begin to describe the Mike Daisey monologue I saw Sunday afternoon. I finally just decided to embed a YouTube excerpt above from a show that was protested in 2007, and to repeat below what I told her:

He's like an extremely hyper fat-geek version of Spalding Gray, but with elements of Laurie Anderson and Firesign Theatre thrown in (I don't mean with the latter two that Daisey uses music or audio gimmicks, he just has the same sense of taking banal images and making them seem ominous and apocalyptic that Laurie and FT do). And if you Google him, you'll find a YouTube video of Christian students walking out on his set and a parent pouring water over his organizing notes. Interesting. Makes it brave for him to play seven shows in an evangelical town, but the sellout crowd yesterday was going wild.

Favorite lines (This one a repeated one like the stanza of a song): "What can we do to enable your vision?"

"There were two of me bifurcated at the nose. This half was saying, 'Tell her it doesn't have to be that way. Tell her this is illusory, and all she has to do is stand up and say something.' This half of me is saying, 'Bite your fucking tongue. There is nothing you can do. If you say something, it will simply reinforce her feeling small and powerless, and she'll give you that shrug, and you know you can't bear to see that shrug.' "

"They wanted me to put up a Tesla coil in the main stage after their performances with live rabbits, with each rabbit dressed as Sigmund Freud or Benito Mussolini, wearing little inward-facing vid cams so that their little rabbit faces were projected on giant screens, sporting spontaneous and unexpected relations between the figures of history, as live rabbits often tend to do. When Mussolini died of some plague infesting many of the rabbits, he was dragged off stage. The Village Voice said that this was a metaphor for Mussolini leaving the stage of world history. This is how art is made in America."


"I understood why Ray (Ozzie) wanted to de-featurefy Microsoft Office, but this puts people out of work and makes them feel useless. The way people are given gainful employment is by giving them pointless tasks - repetitive ones in heavy industry, feature-adding ones in the information industry - none of which actually help matters. I would much rather see a simple "Stop All This Shit" click box at the top of Microsoft Word - don't do anything, let me be a fucking typewriter. OK? It won't happen."

Tesla, Dead Dogs, Mike Daisey, and a Boardwalk-Park Place Sweep

Sometimes there are hidden advantages to living in a town where Nikola Tesla performed the bulk of his research - cameo movie appearances, strange cultists on street corners (who left after the local Tesla museum went bankrupt), and now, an appearance by storyteller Mike Daisey. Daisey is a former Microsoft exec and connector of arcane theories that entances everyone who sees him. His new piece, Monopoly!, covers the secret history of the board game, Tesla's work on large-scale electromagnetic fields, and the history of the Tesla-Edison fights that led to far too much animal abuse. Just got a ticket to see Daisey's extemporaneous rambling next Friday.

I've always appreciated storytellers more than standup comics. In the late 1980s, I saw Spalding Gray give a live performance of The Terrors of Pleasure, then saw the movie version of Swimming to Cambodia. Solo monologists can mix humor and terror in a way few standups can, while comic theater groups like Firesign Theatre can reach depths of story-telling only approached by traditionalist theatre venues.

Gray's live monologue explained the Reagan era I had just lived through, in some eerie and intuitive way. When he committed suicide in 2004, I wore my little Spalding Gray button for days on end. I get the feeling that Daisey's piece on Tesla and Disney and Monopoly will connect the dots in a way only approached by Clarissa Explains It All or One Great Big Conspiracy.

A Daisey user's guide to the 21st century would be useful right about now. Market cornering of the Broadway Park Place blue does not seem to do much good in these days of AIG givebacks, but neither does owning all the utilities. Should I follow the advice of Stephen Colbert and Jeanne Moos and bring out the pitchforks and torches? It certainly would feel good to pillory a bunch of big shots. On the other hand, that might be as useless as killing dogs (or elephants) on stage to prove the relative safety of alternating or direct current. Maybe Mike can speak to the role of vengeance, nationalization, capitalist monopolies, and unseen global electromagnetic fields.