"Eventually, he asked the audience, 'So, do you want to talk about the thing?' He was referring, of course, to the accusations against him."

"The audience cheered. Somewhat wearily, he said, 'I like to jerk off, and I don’t like to be alone.' More laughter. 'So what can I tell you? I can offer you some advice. If you ask, "Can I jerk off in front of you?"—don’t do it! And if they say O.K., don’t do it!' The warnings weren’t exactly sobering or remorseful; they gestured at his actions without really acknowledging what he’d done or to whom or, more important, why. It was a nod in the direction of his troubles, but with no hard look at what those troubles meant. 'Everybody has their thing sexually,' he said. 'But when everyone knows what your thing is . . . now Obama knows what my thing is. Oh, God.'... As the show went on, I began to want to feed C.K., telepathically, the different forms of storytelling he brought to his work when he was at the top of his game and unafraid of losing out on being loved. What if he were to turn his shame into a story? What if he imagined how his dick looked to a woman he had horrified? Couldn’t he go there, Richard Pryor style, and talk from the vantage point of his disgraced penis? Instead, he let his better stories trail off, fearing perhaps the existential ramifications of doing what he used to do, digging and dancing in the minefields of our collective unconscious."

In "Can Louis C.K. Spin His Troubles Into Art?/Touring for the first time since his sexual-misconduct scandal, the comedian gestured at his actions without really acknowledging what he’d done," The New Yorker's Hilton Als gives the genius-idiot comedian some advice on how to do comedy. Why not?

You probably won't read the whole thing because you probably don't have a subscription to The New Yorker, so I've got to tell you that much of the essay is about black people. It's too much trouble to explain why, so I'll just gesture at it: He begins by talking about the Norman Mailer essay "The White Negro," drags in a conversation between Louis C.K. and Chris Rock (with lots of "n-word"), refers to Pigmeat Markham and Big Mama Thornton, has some stuff about a black character on the "Louis" TV show, quotes Louis saying it would be "hot" if your mother told you she once had sex with "a black guy," and said it would be "hot" if Louis, in his new show, "became his mother, teetering toward that black consort, in love with the American forbidden?"

To absorb this you probably need to know if Hilton Als is black. If you don't already know, examine your thoughts first picturing him as white and then picturing him as black. Are they different? I think they they are!

ADDED: "Now Obama knows what my thing is. Oh, God." I like the "Oh, God," because, essentially, Obama has taken the place of God. He sees and He knows and His knowing that you have fallen short is a heavy burden for which you know you must atone.

AND: Here's Wikipedia on "The White Negro":

"In a way, it’s impossible to review Gold’s staging of 'King Lear,' because, in the arrogance of its conception...."

"Gold has set the play in what I took to be a contemporary universe, but I have no idea why the great hall where Lear (Glenda Jackson) meets with his family to divvy up his kingdom is covered in gold leaf. Are we in a North Korean palace? Trump Tower? A Russian oligarch’s apartment?... Goneril (Elizabeth Marvel, overreaching as usual) has an American twang, while Regan (Aisling O’Sullivan) speaks with an Irish brogue, and Ruth Wilson, doing her very best as Cordelia, and later as the Fool, has clear, British stage diction. Wouldn’t Lear’s daughters have grown up and been educated in the same place? Are their accents meant to indicate that they’ve already retreated into separate territories? Or does Gold mean to telegraph who the daughters 'really' are by giving them their own voices?... [R]ather than allow these actors to do what they do so well, Gold degrades their grace. He has [Pedro] Pascal’s Edmund... simulate a quickie with Goneril, after which she smears his lips with their sexual fluids. Is this a shocking gesture or a 'shocking' gesture? There’s much talk of body parts and copulation in 'King Lear,' as well as a great deal of nasty paternal derision, as when Lear calls his elder daughters 'unnatural hags.' When Glenda Jackson, the butch girl of my dreams from all those incredible seventies movies, utters such lines, the other actors shrink...  In the first half of the play, she is ferocious and loud, grandstanding and bellowing. She calms down in the second half, when Lear’s mind disintegrates, and I wish she could have shown some of that nuance sooner."

The New Yorker's Hilton Als does not like Sam Gold's version of "King Lear." The "butch girl of [his] dreams" just isn't doing it right, for some reason that I suppose I'd have to see the production to understand. The headline extracts Als's point like this: "Sam Gold’s Self-Serving Vision of 'King Lear'/In a new staging, the director uses Shakespeare’s words as a launching pad from which to explore his own theatrical concerns."

Why "Self-Serving"? Gold is pleasing himself and not the audience? But why is the audience disserved? There are so many productions of "King Lear." It's not as if the audience needs one particular approach and not another. At one point, Als asks, "But where do you draw the line between an interpretation that is freeing—and thus freeing to the audience, too—and one that is just frustratingly and bafflingly self-indulgent?" And that's a question I would ask about this review.

Speaking of self-indulgent, Als spends a good part of his column talking about Duke Ellington, whose connection to the subject is nothing more than that he once recorded an album full of instrumentals inspired by Shakespeare plays. It is, according to Als, "a sensual, undulating, and thoughtful album" that shows "the value of great artists’ being driven by the work of other great artists to create something new." So what? That has little to do with putting on a play with actors that have to speak a pre-determined text that has been interpreted and reinterpreted thousands of times.