@toddodowd @irrigatearts @robynhendrix @swirlspice @laurazabel @rhubarbism Would love more of your thoughts on this! bit.ly/LNAsBc

— TCDP Arts (@ArtsOrbit) July 25, 2012

I’m not entirely sure on what. In the Daily Planet’s Arts Orbit piece on Bedlam Theatre‘s new location in Lowertown St. Paul, Gabler basically does two things:

• Lists a bunch of facebook and twitter posts by local people and organizations that essentially amount to “Yay! Congratulations! Exciting!”
• Points out that opening a space in Lowertown is risky for numerous reasons, with a list of questions on related issues. In a nutshell: transportation and access, attracting people from Minneapolis, effectively engaging in the lowertown community, and Bedlam potentially getting stretched too thin when they do try to open a new Minneapolis location in addition to the St. Paul space.

The social media quotes include those that I posted as Irrigate and as myself, and some of the comments, replies and retweets that we got off of that. None of which were very memorable or controversial. I wouldn’t exactly list my “yay, happy clapping” retweet as a superb accomplishment in 140 character composition. It’s certainly true that the news has gotten lots of positive response; the link to the MPR article that I posted on the Irrigate page got significantly more “likes” than average and we are just one of a gobjillion pages that posted about it over the past day and a half. Yet personally, I’m left wondering: okay, umm, cute, you follow all of my multiple internet personalities, I follow all of yours, we operate in the same social media sphere, and everybody we know is saying happy words about Bedlam. So you are cataloguing them and making an article out of them. I don’t really count that as “journalism” and am tempted to just say “whoop de doo.” What’s the point? It feels a bit like reaching for an angle that just isn’t there. The questions posed at the end about the future of the project also kind of make me go “Yeah, duh. Opening any kind of business is a risk. Opening an art performance related business, even more so. So what?”

Okay, I’m being a bit harsh. And rather jaded. While it does take up at least ¾ of the entire article, you could argue the social media mashup was intended as a light-hearted introduction to the topic, and I should probably stop giving Jay a hard time about it now. ArtsOrbit is trying to get a discussion going about the challenges Bedlam will face when it takes over the former Rumours & Innuendo Nightclub space. I can put in my two cents about that, since he/they asked nicely, even though I don’t really feel all that qualified to do so. [Read more…]