Accismus

Slate columnists are on a roll lately (see also related articles at the end). Anytime you think merely ingesting a substance says something about your virtue as a person, you’ve likely fallen victim to a marketing campaign. In fact, I’m suspicious of the whole ‘moral groceries’ movement in general. I don’t doubt there are some benefits; I’m just not sure that spending large amounts on attractively packaged, peer-approved, designer groceries is helping impoverished nations, the environment and our own bodies and souls quite as much as it is helping Whole Foods, Amy, Annie, et al. Avoiding pesticides is all well and good, but it’s not the key to a Utopian society. You can’t save the world just by stuffing your face.

Now, having preached, let me redeem myself slightly by admitting that my own fridge is currently stocked with these products, and that this entire rant was likely triggered by my wandering into the Union Square Whole Foods yesterday and having the most terrifying experience of my life. I’m still recovering. In my opinion, one of the chief advantages to living in this country in this century is that we do not typically have to club each other to death for food. Apparently, fashionable New Yorkers don’t know this. I was buffeted, herded and knocked from one end of the store to the other, up the escalators and down, around the olive bar and into the cheese display. I could sort of glimpse vague food shapes above the massing swell of browsing heads, but every time I got close, I was promptly shoved out again. I can understand having to work so hard to get up to a bar and obtain a martini, but I’ll be damned if scoring soy milk from a dairy case is worth possible death and dismemberment. At one point, my splinted hand (which I’d mostly been clutching guardedly to my chest as if it were an infant) accidentally slipped into a lady’s shopping bag and lodged there. I tried like mad to extract it, but it only became more entangled. ‘Sorry, sorry,’ I kept repeating, as she, a real pro, went on with her shopping, dragging me up and down the aisle and glaring at me the while.

When I finally extricated myself from her bag, I was more than ready to flee. Oh, for a $.69 Patio burrito from a corner minimart! Sadly, the exits were through the check-out lines, which were so long, they wound around an entire floor. Again, I’d think a major advantage to living in a thriving capitalist country would be never having to queue all day for rations, but then, I suppose if it’s your choice and you have an ipod to listen to while you wait, it’s not so bad. At any rate, I finally fought my way out through the entrance, which was about as easy as swimming up a waterfall, and emerged, bloody and battered, in Union Square, where I promptly secured a hot dog from a street vendor.

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On another topic altogether, the Times slams this year’s Humana Festival.I am in favor of new play festivals in general (and the Humana Festival in particular), and not having seen any of the plays reviewed here, I can’t say whether I agree with the review, but I do agree with this:

Marc Masterson, artistic director of the Actors Theater of Louisville, the festival’s host for three decades, favors plays that engage with contemporary culture and politics. That’s admirable, but it can result in work that telegraphs its importance in capital letters (a failing epitomized by Craig Wright’s “Unseen”), prizes preachment over drama (as in that secret history of Barbie) or disguises a hollow core with grabby imagery (as did “Dark Play”).

I’m tired of seeing these badly written issue plays everywhere, and the reason young playwrights keep churning them out is because that’s what the folks with the money and the venues prefer that everyone submit.

Seriously, more links? I do apologize, but it’s just so easy and, as I think I’ve mentioned a couple of hundred times, my hand is hurt. I promise I will post something original before I post any more links.