Read it and weep. Or laugh.
A Tragedy of Homeric Proportions
And now for something completely different: Macbeth acted out by the voices of “The Simpsons.”[youtube www.youtube.com/watch
Rick Miller is the inspired lunatic responsible for MacHomer, a one-man show in which Miller, doing the voices of dozens of Simpsons characters, acts out a version of Macbeth that is recognizably a version of Shakespeare’s tragedy. Apparently, he got the idea during the copious free time afforded by playing the role of Second Murderer in a production of the Scottish tragedy, debuted at the cast party, and has been touring the continent with it ever since.
The show is genuinely funny, and the better you know Macbeth (and “The Simpsons”) the funnier it is. Indeed, if you don’t know Macbeth well, a great many jokes will fly right past you - but don’t worry, there will be plenty more where those came from.
I had the most fun contemplating the casting. Some was obvious - but still brilliant. The rivalry between Homer Simpson and his neighbor, Ned Flanders, combined with Flanders’s conspicuous rectitude, makes him an obvious choice for Banquo. And Crusty the Clown brings down the house as the Porter. (“Knock, knock, knock - Here’s a knocking indeed! If a man were porter of Hell Gate, he should have old turning the key. [Pause] Ah, I got nothing - here, try this one: Knock, knock. Who’s there?)
Other choices were more surprising, but inspired. Duncan is another figure of innocent rectitude (if sometimes played as a bit dim), so casting Mr. Burns is a surprising and interesting choice, but one that makes sense structurally and pays marvelous dividends at the end of the play. But casting Barney as Macduff is nothing short of a miracle. The trickiest moment in a comic version of Macbeth is the one moment that cannot be played for purely comic effect without destroying the story: the moment when Macduff learns his family has been slaughtered. Miller handles it perfectly, the news delivered comically by Troy McClure (who plays several roles - that’s a “Simpsons” joke, but also a Macbeth joke, as the numerous plaid-clad secondary characters in the tragedy are awfully easy to confound), but received with utter earnestness by Barney’s Macduff. It’s a moment of real emotion, and precisely because of Barney’s distinctive quaver we’re able to feel the sting without being taken out of the overall comic mood of the piece.
The toughest casting, though, is Homer and Marge as Macbeth and his lady. And here, well, Miller frankly has a problem. Homer is certainly stupid and impulsive enough to be Macbeth. And Homer’s active but self-involved imagination provides numerous opportunities to mock Macbeth’s morbid but vivid waking dreams (“Is this a dagger I see before me? Or a pizza?”) But “thou woulds’t be great; art not without ambition” is not exactly the way I would describe Homer Simpson. And the differential in intelligence between Marge and Homer certainly maps onto the Scottish couple. But Marge is notable for basically never pushing Homer to be something he isn’t. And, indeed, Rick Miller needs to turn Marge into “evil Marge” whenever she has to act out of character, which is basically in most of Lady Macbeth’s scenes.
And then there’s Macduff’s line: “He has no children.” When Barney says this, it is totally convincing. But then we remember he’s saying it about Homer Simpson, and … well, Homer and Marge about as inconceivable without their children as Macbeth and Lady Macbeth are inconceivable with them.
Notwithstanding this central difficulty, the show is an enormous amount of fun. It’s on perpetual tour (I saw it in New York, at NYU’s Skirball Center), currently playing at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival in Ontario. It’s worth the trip to see it, and if you can’t get there, it may well be coming to a theatre near you.
In retrospect, the GI Bill, as the 1944 Servicemen’s Readjustment Act is called, was one of the greatest democratizing forces in American history. Delbanco rightly remarks that the bill “brought onto campuses throughout the nation—including the most elite—students whose fathers would have once set foot there only as janitors.” Of 15 million returning veterans, just over half took advantage of the bill’s generous incentives and provisions in order to satisfy their aspirations for self-cultivation and professional advancement. By 1948 veterans counted for nearly 50 percent of all college students, thus fulfilling the promise of the land-grant public university system, mandated by Congress with the Morrill Act in 1862. Thereafter, both university life and American society were transformed by a seemingly irreversible process of democratic inclusion and upward social mobility. Most colleges and universities ceased being bastions of privilege, the exclusive preserve of a moneyed, Protestant elite. For the first time, men and women of diverse social backgrounds were afforded the opportunity to cultivate the knowledge and self-understanding necessary to surmount the oppressive constraints of class, race and gender.
So what’s the problem? Antoine Dodson possibly said it best when he famously told Good Morning America that he had a “hit on iTunes” but was still “in the projects” in 2010. Now, it’s not like this guy wrote a great American novel, right? Right. The problem is that internet celebrities and memes are now making up a greater part of our “culture” than ever — and for some of us, they are almost the entirety of it. We consume them: we watch their videos millions of times, we caption their images freely and exuberantly, and the mainstream is waking up to that. But mainstream companies and their ad companies aren’t playing for the same reasons — the mainstream is here to get paid. Many of the attendees whom I spoke to, once I talked to them long enough, mentioned that they weren’t really better off financially than they had been before creating whatever they created, or becoming a meme, or finding their little corner of celebrity. The problem with this model is not that the subjects of our internet culture aren’t profiting enough off of them: it’s that literally everyone else is. The companies who make ads to sell their phones, the massive websites which post them and sell highly profitable ads against them, the makers who create Nyan Cat scarves. These are often highly successful ventures with massive corporate structures behind them. Entire websites find their bread and butter in posting endless variations of Chuck Testa images, and it’s not just highly criticized sites like I Can Has Cheezburger; even CNN routinely gets in on the game these days. Chuck himself, is in many ways, a cash cow for plenty of websites, but he’s still running his taxidermy business, and told me flat out that he is “broke.”
Here, the recent history of the Financial Times is instructive. Last June, the company pulled its iPad and iPhone app from iTunes and launched a new version of its website written in HTML5, which can optimize the site for the device a reader is using and provide many features and functions that are applike. For a few months, the FT continued to support the app, but on May 1 the paper chose to kill it altogether.And Technology Review? We sold 353 subscriptions through the iPad. We never discovered how to avoid the necessity of designing both landscape and portrait versions of the magazine for the app. We wasted $124,000 on outsourced software development. We fought amongst ourselves, and people left the company. There was untold expense of spirit. I hated every moment of our experiment with apps, because it tried to impose something closed, old, and printlike on something open, new, and digital.
Finally, since this is a blog about academia and not journalism, I’ll forgive the commenters for not understanding that it is not my job to read entire dissertations before I write a 500-word piece about them. I read some academic publications (as they relate to other research I do), but there are not enough hours in the day or money in the world to get me to read a dissertation on historical black midwifery. In fact, I’d venture to say that fewer than 20 people in the whole world will read it. And the same holds true for the others that are mentioned in the piece.
‘Most of all what Apple did was they charged $400 to $1,000 for the hardware that was necessary to get a differentiated user experience on data that 100% of their customers could get for free off a desktop device,’ [Roger McNamee] said. 'Every Apple customer has consciously voted with $400 to $1,000 against the world wide web.’