Mike Daisey is currently on hour 19 of his 24-hour monologue. I gave up last night at about 3 am, and couldn’t settle into it again this morning when I went back, so now I’m checking out the livestream from the relative comfort of my couch. Erik is still there, though, and he’s been blogging all night. It’s pretty fucking great.
2:39 am—In what is either a brilliant satire of goofy performance art or just goofy performance art, Mike Daisey is now delivering a monologue/anecdote/dream sequence about that one time he turned into a female “prostitute in a brothel in Düsseldorf.” Meanwhile, two young, cute, immaculately dressed vegans fry bacon onstage on either side of him. —Erik
2:57 am—Overheard from one of the young, cute, immaculately dressed vegans: “It’s cool. I’ll shower afterwards.” —Erik
4 am—“My favorite episode of Battlestar Galactica is the clearly the best episode of Battlestar Galactica,” Daisey says, citing “33” as the best (this opinion is neither uncommon nor controversial, and is the correct opinion to have), and then going on to note that the series ended well (which is both an uncommon and controversial opinion, but also the correct one to have). Like that episode—in which the Galactica’s fleet has to jump via a faster-than-light drive every 33 minutes in order to avoid their enemies—Daisey says he’s on the clock, here, every 45 minutes, having to compile notes on every break, then come out at the top of every hour. “The whole episode’s about fatigue. It’s a beautiful episode,” he says. He is grappling, he adds, with “the very real possibility that this is not sustainable.” —Erik
12:12 pm—because we are in a decrepit old high school with really uncomfortable seats of fucking course there is a fire alarm and everybody follows daisey out to the flagpole like we are all six years old —erik
I was there. i want my 24 hrs back. off the teetering cliff into his solipsistic dream world was not what I had in mind, especially for so damn long. I think his non-fiction personal history/philosohizing/history/culture/ephemera stuff is great. This was not that. It was a long form science fiction story populated with his friends and family. he wishes he was a science fiction writer, but has renounced the written word, and this is what we got. Which would have been FINE if it didn’t involve me being in a dark room listening to is lurch along for the better part of 24 hrs. Blech.