VERY INSIGHTFUL!

Fascinating interview of Penny Arcade by Geraldine Winifred Visco--a real eye opener from someone who has been performing since 1968! Check out her new show Longing Lasts Longer wherever it appears. I caught it in August and love her unique, powerful voice. An excerpt:

GV: What do you feel about the world today?

PA: We’re in an emergency wishing it would go back to being in a crisis. It’s 2014 and you look around on the streets and see Dickensian poverty. Homeless people in rags. Even in the ’80s we didn’t see the kind of poverty we’re seeing on the streets right now. Everything now is ruled by the media. Mediated by the media. So drug companies and the food industry have become as powerful and opaque as the banking industry. We just don’t know what’s really going on. There’s not much transparency in anything. We’ve lost a lot of power as American citizens.

We’ve really abdicated our responsibility to a democracy for the people and by the people. So we’re getting what we deserve because we’re not involved. Everybody’s living in a virtual world to one degree or another. My show is about that, about how that was created. How did we go into living in this virtual reality almost all of us live in now? Very few of us are really grounded in the real world — having real friends we see face to face. It’s kind of sad and mechanical out there.

Penny Arcade will participate in the 41st annual New Year’s Day marathon benefit reading for the Poetry Project on January 1, 2015.

READ:   HYPERALLERGIC