Define "a Life"...

December 24th, 9 PM

2011-12-24T21:04:00.001-05:00

From here on in, I shoot without a script...

's no snow day

2011-01-26T10:21:00.002-05:00

I don't want to seem ungrateful for an actual official Snow Day at work. Really, I don't. They're rare enough.

I was up way early to battle my way in, then got the 6:57 AM phone call that this morning's 10:00 performance was cancelled — no schools — so I relaxed and decided I could take the time to have breakfast and a nice hot cup of tea before I set out, and it was a good thing I did, too, because I'd barely left when I got another call informing me that PLTC was, in fact, closing for the snow. So — no performances today, meetings all postponed, an actual "day off" because of the snow.

The thing is, there's stuff I need to get done at work. This would have been my first day back after having been away at the Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park for the past week. (We got a Snow Day during tech rehearsals there, or a Snow Half-Day, rather, but only because we were wholly on schedule and had no serious need for the time.) I'd figured on getting myself back into the swing of things at PLTC and getting caught up on the things I was able to back-burner for the past week. Some of that I can do or sort-of-do at home, so I guess I'll work on what I can. This is not a blessed-white-absolution Snow Day but rather a work-at-home Snow Day.

Plus, this means I now have no excuse for not shoveling my sidewalks.

< sigh >

Funnier than the average bear

2010-12-14T23:43:00.001-05:00

Nothing — I mean nothing — about the Yogi Bear movie can possibly be better than this.

Don't F#@% with Comicbook Nerds

2010-07-26T10:53:00.003-04:00

"Let those who worship evil's might

Beware my power..."

The Westboro Baptist Church makes me sad (and mad), but this just makes me happy...

Three -- count 'em, three -- protestors from Fred Phelps's Westboro Baptist "Church" group showed up at Comic-con; I expect they were unprepared for what they met --

As Mark Twain put it, "Against the assault of laughter nothing can stand."

And amidst the mockery, some truths:

But seriously...

The never-ending battle continues.

All glory to the hypno-toad.

Cut short mid-

2010-04-10T09:13:00.006-04:00

I knew what I was getting into. I can't say I didn't.

Last night I watched the last episode of Defying Gravity, the sci-fi series ABC pulled the plug on last year. I can't say I watched the final episode, because there was nothing "final" about it. I was watching on on DVD from Netflix, so at least I got to see all 13 existing episodes; ABC didn't even air them all. For a show with a long-form story -- which creator James Parriott says was plotted for at least three seasons -- such abrupt cancellation is the risk you take if you begin watching it (unless, of course, you don't begin watching it until the whole story has been told as was intended). I've watched other shows where I knew at the beginning that the planned story was not given the chance to reach its conclusion -- or, in some cases, any conclusion -- so I knew what to expect when the supply of episodes runs out.

I can see where Defying Gravity had a difficult job building an audience. It has a large cast of characters, a plot filled with mysteries and revelations, and it told its story with exactly the sort of serialized progression I enjoy, which is also a serial progression that makes it difficult for casual viewers to get into the show. I think we're nearing the close of a window of time within which shows like this were easier to pitch. The atmosphere must have been particularly receptive at ABC, where two shows with ongoing plotlines -- Lost and Heroes -- performed well right out of the gate. DG evidently did not, and was never given a chance to build an audience.

Which is a bit of a shame. There's so little sci-fi on television in general, and little of what there is rises far above the re-boot of V. Defying Gravity had characters I found engaging, if a bit too stock, and a story I found interesting. But it was, as I said, a large cast of characters, so everyone wasn't featured in every episode, which can make it hard for a viewer watching intermittently to get a handle on things. And the show lifted its narrative form from Lost; I'm talking about the "dramatic backstory" structure ( my term) that takes the conventional A-story / B-story / C-story approach common to shows juggling multiple plotlines and folds it in upon itself by interweaving backstory as an essential element of the narrative progression; I'm know other shows have used the structure, at least for isolated episodes, but I can't think of a predecessor show that relied upon it so totally as Lost did from the outset.

Defying Gravity was built with this structure at its core: every episode intercuts into the "now" action scenes from "5 Years Ago," following the early days of the crew's training and providing revelations about their that inform the ongoing story at -- naturally -- appropriate moments. It's really a classic structure, a variation on the tradition of beginning a tale in medias res. With DG's being cut short by cancellation, it results in a greater number of unanswered questions, perpetual cliffhangers in the past as well as the present.

Damned frustrating. But I can't say I didn't know what I was getting into.

So why is the next series I'm starting also a show cancelled before its time? Well, in this case I at least know that the creators had a chance to tie things up.

If The Shoe Fits...

2010-04-05T13:38:00.003-04:00

This past weekend I bought my first pair of genuine Birkenstocks. (I've owned sandals of a similar design in the past, but never the Thing Itself.) I can't say that this officially makes me a genuine granola-eating, NPR-listening Liberal -- I think that's been more or less a given for quite some time now -- but it certainly contributes to my looking the part.

And, yes, they're very comfortable.

Clarity

2010-03-22T15:07:00.002-04:00

Over the weekend, NPR interviewed some of the "Tea Partiers" in D.C. while they were protesting healthcare. Yes, I know exactly what I just wrote. They were protesting against more than this specific legislation; they -- or at least some of those interviewed -- were protesting a moral position. I quote: "Healthcare is not a right."

And they wonder why I think they're evil.

Whiteout

2010-02-10T14:04:00.004-05:00

2:07pm

I'm about to head outside and try to get a little caught up with this snow storm, shovel the walks down a bit. Perhaps attack the end of the driveway; the plows have heaped the pile capping my drive almost as high as the mounds on either side, the snow I cleared from the drive a few days ago.

The snow's still coming down with great sincerity, but the winds seem to have died down a bit. A while ago, the gusts were making moments of whiteout between my door and the other side of the street...

2:29pm

Cleared the front walk and the sidewalk (well, my sidewalk) end to end. The end of the drive will have to wait. Still not wholly recovered from the weekend's shoveling, my back will only bear so much before starting to seize up. I'm glad I did what I did, though -- what with the snow blowing about and filling things in, it was already getting near impossible to discern just where the two-foot-deep pathways I'd made in the first snowfall had been. By the time I headed back inside, the walk I'd had clean a few minutes earlier had a new dusting stuck to it already. So the walks are caught up more or less, and the drive remains buried by what's certain to be the heaviest of the stuff I need to shift.

This snow isn't the relatively friendly powder that buried us over the weekend. At least it didn't start that way; after I'd scooped the top six or eight inches off rather easily, the next layer turned out to be of an altogether different character; clearing down to the pavement means shifting a thickish layer of wet snow and half-frozen slushy, heavy stuff. Temperatures last night and through today haven't been as low as they were for the weekend's storm. The air has been hovering around and just above freezing (although I'll testify that the gusts bite keenly), so we're dealing with a much wetter snow than before. Since easily half of the more than two feet at the end of my driveway is stuff piled there by the plows, it's going to be less like shoveling snow and more like shoveling two-litre bottles of soda three at a time.

I've been thoroughly inundated by the one thing I don't like about winter.

I'm going to eat lunch.

4WD Nostalgia

2010-02-06T23:54:00.003-05:00

Lots and lots of snow. Something like two feet, more with drifts. I shoveled a lot today. And my truck is thoroughly stuck at an odd angle in the driveway.

I have to keep reminding people that my Ford Ranger, while quite nice, is not 4-wheel drive.

This is one of those times when I really miss my old Jeep Wrangler. One of the last of the two-stick manual transmissions, it had a second shift stick for controlling the 4-wheel drive. As I understand it, the Wranglers they're making now have a push-button to switch into 4WD. Bleh. Gimme the old brute mechanics.

With 4-wheel low- and high-speed options, available in reverse as well as the 5-speed, you could manage something approaching 100% control over that Jeep's transmissions in all their permutations. I could pop into neutral while moving, engage the 4-wheel high, and ease into 4-wheel control at most any speed; that move got me out of more than one icy road spin. And in the 4-wheel low ratio, first gear could find and grab the slightest traction.

In short, no way would my old Jeep have skewed like the Ranger did backing out of a snowy driveway.

There are two modes in which I miss that old Jeep. In fair weather when riding in the open would feel great, and in wretched weather when the power and control would feel, well, powerful and in control.

But push-button 4-wheel drive? Might just as well get a Subaru.

Just sayin'

2010-01-23T14:29:00.006-05:00

On June 12, 1967, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its decision on the case of Loving v. Virginia. In Loving, the High Court unanimously ruled that anti-miscegenation marriage laws were unconstitutional. In his opinion, Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote, "Marriage is one of the 'basic civil rights of man,' fundamental to our very existence and survival. To deny this fundamental freedom on so unsupportable a basis as the racial classifications embodied in these statutes, classifications so directly subversive of the principle of equality at the heart of the Fourteenth Amendment, is surely to deprive all the State's citizens of liberty without due process of law. The Fourteenth Amendment requires that the freedom of choice to marry not be restricted by invidious racial discriminations. Under our Constitution, the freedom to marry, or not marry, a person of another race resides with the individual and cannot be infringed by the State."

A convenient reminder from the Fourteenth Amendment:

Section 1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

I'm sure that in the eyes of many of the citizens of many of the fourteen states that had standing laws restricting the right to marry at the time Loving came down, the ruling that overturned those laws did not represent majority rule or opinion. It was, nevertheless, the correct ruling, rooted firmly in the Constitution in both spirit and letter, and in accord with basic ethics. The "mixed-race" couples in question were not asking to be granted any "special rights," nor was the Court granting any. It was merely acknowledging and guaranteeing their existing rights as citizens under the Constitution.

So how, Constitutionally or ethically, is same-sex marriage different?

It's not.

The motivation behind every press to restrictively define marriage, in a Constitutional amendment or anywhere else, stems from an awareness that there is no Constitutional basis for denying any two people the right to marry. What basis proponents of restrictive marriage have for their view is not a legal one, nor is it objective or rational. They'll say that their basis is moral; it is not, however, ethical.

I'm just sayin'.

WFT? #321

2010-01-21T17:45:00.003-05:00

I haven't posted anything here for quite a while (owing to a number of reasons that have naught to do with this post), but the Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commissio n demands comment.

“If the First Amendment has any force,” Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote for the majority, which included the four members of its conservative wing, “it prohibits Congress from fining or jailing citizens, or associations of citizens, for simply engaging in political speech.”

Subtle wording there: "citizens or associations of citizens." That "associations" presents the thin edge that can be used to open the argument for free speech being guaranteed to, say, labor unions just as much as it is to, for example, the HRC. Fine. Considering that the same first amendment also stipulates that the Congress shall make no law "prohibiting the free exercise ... of the right of the people to peaceably assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances," the extension of the right to free speech to those peaceable assemblages of people is a reasonable extrapolation.

If one is willing to accept the assertion that a corporation or any business is an assemblage of citizens in the same sense as, say, a political action group or a committee of individuals circulating a petition or carrying signs in a protest march (and I'm by no means in agreement with any assertion that they are fundamentally the same thing), then one would need to grant the same rights to all such groups. I would argue that a business the principle purpose of which is financial profit is not in part or at all in the same class as a corporation that has as its fundamental goal the performance of some social service or achievement of some social or political change; the latter can, I believe, be said to share in the rights of the individual citizens from whom it is composed and by whom it is supported, while the former can not. The law already acknowledges their difference and makes any number of distinctions between for-profit and not-for-profit corporate entities (e.g. the tax exempt status granted to qualifying NPOs). Abundant precedent exists to establish the distinction between these two classes of "associations of citizens."

My general argument would be that such a distinction indicates that for-profit corporations cannot be said to fall within the scope of the first amendment guarantees referred to in Kennedy's statement on the ruling.

My direct response to the ruling, however, is more specific. Let us allow, for the moment, that the above distinction between types of corporations does not in itself entail their being treated differently as regards freedom of speech rights under the first amendment. Does free speech intrinsically and unequivocally apply to the actual exchange of funds in direct or indirect association with, and thus potentially contingent upon, some return in kind, in either service or goods? I maintain that it does not in all cases.

Completely crass example: I can say to the bartender that I'd like to fuck that woman sitting at the far end of the bar; that's free speech. I can even say it directly to the woman, at least once; the first time I say it could be defended as free speech, while the forth time I say it can be defined as harassment. I could even shout aloud to all those present in the bar that I'd like to fuck this woman. All potentially defensible as freedom of speech. Now add money to the picture. If I buy her a drink, after which she agrees to have sex with me, that's one thing. If I hand her $100, after which she agrees to have sex with me, that's another thing entirely under law. Accepting the drink, presumably in exchange for sex, makes her a slut; accepting cash, again presumably in exchange for sex, makes her a criminal. (Let's skip the knotty question of exactly how and whether or not prostitution is a crime; under current law in most of the US it is.) More: my success in trading cash for sex makes me a criminal. If I ask the bartender to serve her that drink, for which I'm paying, and he does, the bartender is only doing his job, regardless of whether the woman and I have sex as a direct or indirect result. If, however, I ask him to tell her I'll give her $100 if she has sex with me, and he does, and she does, it could be argued that he's complicit in what is regarded as a crime. More: if he for some foolish reason agrees to carry the five twenties I hand him down the length of the bar and hand them to the woman, telling her the money is from me and I want to fuck her, it might well be asserted that he is himself committing a crime. When he serves her a drink at my request, and tells her its from me, he's merely being a lobbyist; when he passes her my cash in exchange for persuading her to have sex with me, he's being a pimp, whether he makes an immediate direct cash profit out of the activity or not.

Not a perfect analogy, of course, but I expect you get my point. Campaign donations are far too direct a method of potential persuasion to be considered something protected under the first amendment's guarantees of freedom of speech in all cases.

If nothing else, there's a matter of scale involved in the difference between my individual campaign contribution and one on a corporate scale. If I offer that woman the $2.17 I have in pocket change and she has sex with me, the assertion that I've just paid for sex is debatable (maybe she found the idea laughable, and we end up having sex because she find me amusing); if the dollar amount is suddenly $217.00, however, the same assertion becomes much more credible; zoom that figure up to $217,000.00 and the only question in most peoples' minds would be whether I'd got my money's worth.

We love you, Spider

2009-09-23T00:15:00.003-04:00

I subscribe to this quote-of-the-day website mailing. Sometimes I get great stuff, often enough that it's worth the quick read before I delete the e-mail. This showed up the other day:

You're miserable, edgy and tired. You're in the perfect mood for journalism.

Warren Ellis

(1968 - )

English Author of Comics, Novels and Television

I'm 99 44/100% certain those words came from the mouth of Spider Jerusalem. (Actually, I'd make that 100% certain were it not for the fact that I don't trust anything on the interweb 100% but don't have the time to re-read all my issues of Transmetropolitan to confirm the quote. (But now that I mention it, I think I'd quite enjoy reading Transmet again; it's a series I miss.)) Spider -- and, I infer, Ellis -- would probably feel a mixture of flattery, amusement and contempt at learning he's being quoted in the same place as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.

Incidentally, today's Solzhenitsyn quote was pretty good in its own right:

One should never direct people towards happiness, because happiness too is an idol of the market-place. One should direct them towards mutual affection. A beast gnawing at its prey can be happy too, but only human beings can feel affection for each other, and this is the highest achievement they can aspire to.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

(1918-2008)

Russian Novelist

Resonance

2009-09-07T17:33:00.003-04:00

I've spent some odd hours this weekend online hunting for images and footage of a number of historical events from the past sixty or so years. We've talked about using video projection as an element in the scene change transitions for Absence since each scene jumps forward in time anywhere from two years to a decade or so. The idea of building the events of the timeline into those transitions seems appealing. It's a rich, albeit obvious, opportunity for the sound design -- period music, audio from newscasts, etc. The visual element, though, is a bit more of a challenge. I'm designing the lighting for the show, and because I'm a sucker for a challenge and have no capacity for protecting myself from overwork, I'm exploring possibilities for video.

So I've been poking about online in a hunt for images of things like VE Day, the war in Vietnam, the fall of the Berlin Wall and other less focussed things, like the Cold War (any suggestions for images that evoke the Cold War are most welcome). The last scene in the show takes place in 1993, and the script specifically mentions "CNN news about the first World Trade Center bombing." [sic] If you're lazy about your search parameters, and even if you aren't, a lot of the hits are going to refer to the September 11th attacks in 2001.

There's a lot on the web about the events of that day. I looked at some of the footage of the second plane -- it's eerily well documented -- and found it a very incisive reminder of the feelings on that day. I'm glad the timeline in Absence doesn't extend into the 21st century. I'm uncomfortable enough with the idea of editing elements of that footage, and even more uncomfortable with the thought of how inured to it I might become through the particular sort of familiarity created in the process of editing.

They somehow know me far too well...

2009-09-06T16:12:00.002-04:00

Now that I think about it, it was always pretty much inevitable that I'd find a bunch of things on ThinkGeek that fit my own idiosyncratic tastes. But this was just a little too perfect.

And, terrifyingly, my ThinkGeek wish list presently totals at $1,163.51. Amazon doesn't show you the total cost of everything you've tossed onto a wish list (at least nowhere that I've seen), so my wish list there just piles up full of things I'd like to have if money were not a concern and all I did was have things. Of course it's not likely that I'll ever get all or even most of the things on either list. The act of adding something cool to a wish list gives just a hint of vicarious pleasure at having found a thing I like.

Fruitless Trawling

2009-07-19T13:42:00.002-04:00

Every time I mention a specific corporate entity -- or even a particular class of business -- in this blog, I get some for of spam comment that's a none-to-thinly veiled attempt at shilling. At least that's how it seems.

A short whole ago, I posted about an exceptionally odd item I saw in one of the catalogs Oriental Trading Company sends me. (I once -- once -- bought glowsticks from them for Folk Fest, and they keep sending me catalogs. I get them at work, as well, as a result of having bought something for a show several years ago. At this point I'm almost certain that they've spent more in sending me catalogs than they ever made from my purchases.) I put often the catalogs in the can for amusing toilet time perusal. I just as often toss them into the recycling bin direct.

What do I then find as a comment on that post? A criticism of Oriental Trading Company and a recommendation for a competitor. "Marissa" -- if that is her name, which it almost certainly is not -- tells me that Oriental Trading's CEO used to do cocaine. I can't even be bothered to guess at which is the most intense of the seven different kinds of I-don't-give-a-fuck that fact inspires in me. "Not very family friendly," she says. Sweetie, I'm not very family friendly (and I grow less so every time I hear the term). And the folks at Century Novelty are paying for this?

Okay, I did go to their site, but only for the sake of making the link above. At first glance their site looks less cheesy than Oriental Trading's. Based on the tack of their viral marketing, I suppose that their CEO never did drugs; he's probably into whores -- that seems to be a preferred vice of the "family friendly" crowd.

Still, I think I'll be going to Oriental Trading for my rubber ducky needs for the foreseeable future. I suspect the family friendly folks at Century Novelty might have objections to carrying some ducks.

WTF? #712

2009-07-12T16:06:00.002-04:00

I am not generally squeamish. Indeed, I can't say that I was actually grossed out, as such, when I saw this. It's more that I find it disgusting on an abstract level. It's just plain wrong.

Truly, the depths of the Oriental Trading Company are bottomless.

iFun

2009-06-24T22:20:00.002-04:00

Through a series of links and jumps, I ended up here after finding this.

Oh, yeah -- I got an iPhone last Friday.

The Right Time had come. My Palm device had sputtered into death a while ago; while my Motorola RAZR was still functioning fine as a phone, despite cracked screen covers and other assorted wear and tear, its "calendar" function is nothing like a real calendar/planner app and doesn't sych or backup with anything else I have; the tech toy corner of my geeky little life had developed within it an empty space the size and sleek shape of an iPhone.

Thing is, I have this frustrating track record with my Apple purchases. Their product cycles and my buying schedules never seem to line up. Shortly after I bought my iBook (a purchase timed with my needs at work), Apple rolled out the first of the Intel-based laptops. I blunted any frustration I felt at the time by telling myself that the shift to an Intel chipset meant that the first generation of Macs with the new chips would be an unproven variation on the solidity of the G4 processor in my iBook. Let some other folks road test these new Intel machines, I'd stay safe and secure with my tried and true G4. But then I bought my iPod, a 30 GB model of what they're now calling the "Classic" iPod, and the following week -- I swear -- Apple released the newer version of that same model, with a jump to 40 GB for the same price. Maybe I could have researched the product cycle for that iPod more thoroughly than I did, since there was no outside time factor motivating the purchase, but basic digging turned up no sign that the next iteration was imminent. And Apple has been known to do those unheralded upgrades without notice from time to time. Still, I began to suspect that in the back of the Apple Store in the King of Prussia Mall there might be a red phone that's a direct line to Steve Jobs' office. Hello, Mister Jobs? Greg Miller just bought a new iPod. Yes. Yes, he just walked out the door. Release the next version on Tuesday? Okay!

Paranoid? Damn right. But let's fast-forward a few years: Now it's early 2009 and I'm at the Apple Store with Chaz, my production manager at work, laying out the specs for the Mac Pro tower the theater is buying. We've held off on this as long as possible; Chaz's reasons for delaying are all about money; me, I'm holding back because all my research indicates that there's likely a major upgrade coming soon. "Soon" as in "any day now" soon. But we need the machine to run the video projections in our A Tale of Two Cities, and tech week is nearing. So we cut at as close as we sanely can, and then we order the machine. Nice Mac Pro, sexy and powerful, the sort of computer than inspires tech-lust, and deservedly so. It arrives during the week before tech and I manage to stop drooling long enough to configure it and get the two-projector rig up and running. We tech the show, and on the Tuesday of our invited dress -- I kid you not -- Apple unleashes whiplash-inducing upgrades to the Mac Pro line. I think my groan was felt as a minor tremor in Cupertino.

No fucking way was my iPhone going to be anything like an impulse buy. Interweb chatter, tea leaves and the alignment of the Heavens all pointed to an iPhone upgrade this summer. Apple announced that the new version of the iPhone software would be out this summer. Those sneaky bastards, trying to get us to think that was the upgrade. Hah! I wasn't buying it, and my friend Mike assured me that my suspicions were valid. Wait. The Right Time draws near. Wait, and it will come.

And indeed it did.

I'd never before gone after an Apple product on its launch date. I did recall the insanity the day the first iPhone came out, though. So I went online and "reserved" my iPhone at the KoP Apple Store. (It wasn't a pre-purchase, just a good way for the Apple folks to get a base sense of who would be showing up.) Come Friday, I did my dimmer check and pre-show at work then headed to KoP to get in line. I figured one way or another, there'd be a line. I brought a bottle of water and a book, and passed the time quite comfortably. I didn't check the time when I queued up, so I don't know just how long I was waiting. Certainly half an hour, at least, but probably not a full hour. It was busy, but not what I would call a madhouse. I went to the midnight release one of the Harry Potter books at Borders -- I know a madhouse when I see it, even a well-behaved madhouse. This wasn't a madhouse, just a very, very busy store. I was, however, quite surprised at the number of people in line with me who were talking, checking e-mail or playing on their iPhones. I can only hope they were early adopters, folks who'd bought the first iPhone and were ready for an upgrade. Otherwise, they would be just plain greedy.

Setup, even the AT&T bit of it, was smooth and quick -- the customer benefit from "reserving" online. Before you could say "I will not do Twitter," I was an iPhone user. I think it took at least eighteen, perhaps even a full twenty-four hours before I was an iPhone addict.

But, no, I didn't do this post from my iPhone. I'm not that fast typing on the little graphical keyboard.

Yet.

Does the left hand know...?

2009-05-16T08:19:00.002-04:00

A few posts ago, I wrote about this offer Bank of America telemarketed at me. Definitely a symptom of this whole financial credit crisis thing. BofA had already been targeted to receive at least $20 billion (certainly enough to make even Carl Sagan flinch) in relief funds, and after its government "stress test" is required to raise $34 billion in capital. No wonder they're offering safety net plans with monthly fees -- they need the income.

But I have to wonder just what organizational apparatus is operating -- or failing to -- inside BofA. Yes, I'm carrying a balance on my BofA card, but it's not that much (a little over $1,000 at this point) and I typically pay more than the minimum payment each month (sometimes only a little more) towards getting rid of that balance. I may well have had a late payment or two, owing to my general disorganization regarding all things not theatre during tech weeks, but I don't think I've been late enough to have "missed" a payment. So I can see -- sort of -- where they're coming from in offering me that paranoid protection plan: I'm carrying a low balance and definitely not doing any extravagant spending (indeed, though I've had it for something like twenty years, I use this card hardly at all anymore, as I don't like the experience of dealing with BofA, and I expect the root of the balance I am still carrying probably dates back to before BofA swallowed MBNA); I have a history making relatively steady payments, so I wouldn't appear immanently likely to use this protection plan; those payments are evidently cautious ones, however, though if you consider my income they make perfect sense.

And I have to think that BofA has, finally, considered my income, because as I was going through my post-tech backlog of accumulated mail I found evidence of another symptom of BofA's health: they've reduced my credit line.

Okay, to be honest, it was a ridiculous credit line to begin with. That wasn't wholly BofA's fault, either; MBNA had been given to awarding me unsolicited increases in my credit limit, ostensibly as rewards for my solid credit management, although I think we all know that this practice of upping credit limits was motivated by a desire to encourage more substantial purchasing with the card. Once they absorbed MBNA and took over (a fact of which I received no direct notification that I can recall; I discovered it only when my monthly statement suddenly changed -- I almost threw out the first statement before I registered that it was my MBNA card number), BofA continued the practice. They were also very fond of sending me "cheques" for my credit card account, a thoroughly transparent enticement to spend more and, in my case, a total waste of paper and postage. Still, so long as I felt there was no risk of my falling for it, I saw no reason to argue with their attempts to draw me into owing them more money.

And as for that ridiculous credit line? As of last month, it was $42,700. Yes, that's more than I make in a year. (Yes, I make that little. I work in the arts.) I pretty much treated it as a joke -- such ludicrous examples of our screwed-up economy were funny a year ago. Now... well, I can't help wondering how many people received the same sort of treatment I'd received from BofA, but fell for it. There's a far wider "they" than only the financial institutions themselves in the "What were they thinking?" that's hung in the air these past months.

So, when was going through my pile of mail, I opened a letter from BofA informing me that my credit line had been "adjusted." No mention of the direction in which it had been adjusted. Sure enough, when I opened the statement for April the credit line figure at the top of the page had changed to $21,500. They'd adjusted my credit line to slightly more than half of what it had been.

That's still a pretty large credit line, yes. And it's still true that when you put that together with my CitiBank and American Express cards, and individual accounts like Home Depot, I have plastic credit exceeding my annual income. And, yes, I am carrying balances on Citi and AmEx, a fact which has begun to bother me more in recent months than it has in years. There was a time when I was assiduous about paying off my credit cards as quickly as possible. Over the years, though, as unplanned necessity expenses like automotive repairs would suddenly shoot my credit card balance up by large increments, I grew accustomed to never writing a cheque for the entire balance. And, with the exception of AmEx, the statements changed format in such a way that the actual dollar amount of the finance charge for that month was no longer obvious or, for that matter, always easy to find. I made payments, almost always more than the minimum, and must confess that I sometimes didn't know whether I'd put more onto a card in a given month than I'd taken off. From the fact that I'm still carrying balances on several cards, I'd say there were more than a few months when I put on more than I took off.

Lately, I've taken to using my bank card more often. Unless the purchase is so large that there's a chance the bi-monthly low ebb in my chequing might not cover it, I'll swipe that PNC card rather than Citi, AmEx or [shudder] BofA. I'm paying more attention to which payments are due when, and trying to orchestrate scheduling such that I pay the most I can manage on things with minimum payments. A year ago, something like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies would have been an impulse buy as soon as I saw it on Amazon; now I'm being realistic -- okay, honest -- about the fact that I'm not likely to read it immediately, and I'll just add it to my wish list as a reminder (although I cannot imagine how, short of early-onset Alzheimer's, I could forget something that combines Jane Austen and the walking dead). My godparents gave me a pair of $25 Sunoco gift cards in my Christmas card this year, and I'm still carrying one in the truck against the day the need to fill up coincides with the low dip in my chequing, just as a way to avoid putting so mundane as a tank of gas on a credit card. I'm changing the date on one of my CDs so that it'll mature around the same time next year's school taxes are due, just in case I'm not able to consistently maintain my self-imposed "tax rent" payments into savings. The ongoing foolishness of Dan Didio (whom I've come to think of as the "W." of comics editors) isn't the only reason I'm re-evaluating the comics I buy every month.

Oh, yeah. One more thing -- Bank of America sent me more of those "cheques" this month.

Is that a promise?

2009-05-15T08:35:00.003-04:00

I just stumbled across the following tidbit, and had to share.

From Jesse Ventura, former Governor, former professional wrestler, and former Navy Seal (who says he endured waterboarding as part of his training) --

"Water-boarding is torture... It's drowning. It gives you the complete sensation that you are drowning. It is no good, because you -- I'll put it to you this way: you give me a water board, Dick Cheney and one hour, and I'll have him confess to the Sharon Tate murders."

Can I take that as an offer?

Stumbled

2009-05-12T12:06:00.002-04:00

It only took a little nudge to get me to check in on www.stumbleupon.com this morning. It's almost always entertaining to some degree, and today I found a tidbit worth sharing. This is probably even more entertaining to my video-game-playing friends, but it made me smile. I liked this take, and this is wonderfully wacky, but I think the one I enjoy most is this.

And in other news...

2009-05-11T09:24:00.002-04:00

I found a comment from an unfamiliar source on my last post. Since the people who actually follow my blog can probably be counted on one hand (maybe two, but those would be three-fingered cartoon character hands), whenever a comment pops up from a newbie I usually check it out.

What's interesting here is that when I clicked on Mkcoy to find out more about this fellow with the oddly-spelled name and the strange ideas about punctuation I got sent here.

Interesting trick. I wonder how it works. I mean, it says "blogspot.com" in the URL, so I got curious. Something like this had happened a little while ago with a comment on another post, but that jump-link hadn't had anything blogspot or Blogger in it. I have today off, yet I still woke up early, and hunting for information on this seemed like a good way to procrastinate on doing the dishes.

Well, I never did find out quite what's going on with the whole Mkcoy business specifically, but I did manage to blow off dishwashing for more than an hour-and-a-half and in the process learn a few things about which I'd known little or nothing before. For example, you can have ads in your blog and ostensibly make money whenever people click on them. So that's what that Monetize tab is all about. And here I was thinking it let you format your blog in the style of French impressionist Claude Monet. Silly me. Although you must admit, that version of "Monet-ize" would be cool...

Anyway, I don't think any of this means I could set up my own information link to send people here or, say, here. [sigh]

Along the way, however, I did stumble upon a couple of cool blogs that have naught to do with my original curiosity. I can't explain how my path led here or here, although I'm amused by the former and am likely to keep checking in on the latter; that's just the way amateur interweb searches like mine work; it's like the odd juxtapositions you'd run across searching or browsing a card catalog (remember those?), and that's the beauty of it.

News from New Delhi

2009-05-09T11:20:00.003-04:00

So, I got a telemarketing call this morning "from" Bank of America. The caller ID tagged it as Ontario (which was why I picked it up, since I'm still untangling and tying the last of the Canadian threads in Mom's estate), but the call was pretty obviously coming from India.

I have a credit card with BofA; got it back when it was MBNA. I'm carrying a balance on it (stupid need-to-pass-inspection truck repairs), but not a huge balance. Between them, over the years, MBNA and BofA raised my credit limit to a ridiculously high figure. Given my actual income and correspondingly starving-artist lifestyle, I could live for a year on that credit card alone. I never asked for this, obviously. It's just one of the things these places do. Or, rather, did. I've heard a lot of news reporting that Citi and other credit card companies have been rolling back people's credit lines.

Yes, things have changed. I was late on a CitiBank payment a few months back, and they were quick to call and ask whether I'm working. Yikes!

And these banks are now needing to come up with funds in order to qualify for government aid. BofA just took a shot with me. They're offered me this sweet security deal: if I sign up for this service -- at a $19 monthly fee -- BofA will toss me $3,000 if I find myself unvoluntarily out of work. (Yes, I know it's "involuntarily." Even with her accent, I'm pretty sure she said "unvoluntarily.") This wouldn't be a loan or a cash advance. She was really clear on this point. I wouldn't have to pay it back. They'd just give it to me.

Moreover, if I get married, have a kid, move or any of several other things she tried to list, they'd give me $500. I didn't ask if this applied whether I was marrying or having the kid unvoluntarily or not. I just wanted to establish that there was a monthly fee involved so I could give her a definitive no and get off the phone.

After I'd hung up, it really hit me. BofA had just offered me -- okay, asked me to sign up for -- a service that involved the possibility of their giving me money. Giving me money. Let's think about that for a moment. Obviously, they're playing the odds. They're counting on getting that twenty bucks from me every month and never having to give me any money back. And somewhere in their math, they must've concluded that those odds are in their favor. They need to create some sort of additional income, and on paper the funds coming in from enrollment fees each month must balance the potential pay-outs. Still, it feels a bit of a gamble to me. The $3,000 isn't that big a risk, granted. But that $500... My co-worker Will and his wife are trying to get pregnant. My friends Kathryn and Rusty are expecting. If I were either of them, I might well do my own math and sign up on the simple idea that over nine months I'd only pay in $180 but would get $500 when I had the kid. Sounds like a scheme -- er... bargain -- to me.

Yeah, I know there are probably a bunch of things in the fine print that would protect BofA against someone's using the service that way. Enrollment date versus birth date would be the simplest and most obvious. The whole idea is predicated on my personal feelings of financial uncertainty. Is the nugget of peace-of-mind they're offering worth twenty bucks a month to me? Having just had a generally positive, at times glowing, review at work, I'm inclined to say no. I'm counting on my own odds: on the odds of PLTC's wanting to keep me in my job, and on the odds of PLTC's own financial viability.

Not to say that I don't place some sort of dollar value on peace of mind. I still maintain the disability insurance policy I took out with State Farm years ago to assure that I'd be able to keep making my payments on my truck for a few months if my income were disrupted for some reason. I paid off the truck six years ago, but I've kept up that policy. That particular nugget feels worth $37.98 a year.

Actually, now that I think about it, that might well be the intentioned destiny of my loose change jar from now on...

English Major Trivia

2009-05-07T14:58:00.002-04:00

Today's Robert Browning's birthday. Although I was never all that big on Browning, he's inextricably wedged in my pile of English major knowledge. For one thing, I think every poetry survey touches on "My Last Duchess" or one of his other character/narrator poems. I can easily see why -- their conceit of speaking in the first-person is conveniently accessible to rudimentary explication. For another, there's "Porphyria's Lover," one of those poems with a somewhat sensational interpretation to be teased out an decoded; any suggestion of necrophilia, in a "serious" poem, is understandably appealing to adolescent sensibilities.

As I read more of his work later in my academic years, I found that I preferred some of the poems that have no elaborate conceits or literary references. Simpler stuff like Now!

Now!

Out of your whole life give but a moment!
All of your life that has gone before,
All to come after it, -- so you ignore,
So you make perfect the present, condense,
In a rapture of rage, for perfection's endowment,
Thought and feeling and soul and sense,
Merged in a moment which gives me at last
You around me for once, you beneath me, above me --
Me, sure that, despite of time future, time past,
This tick of life-time's one moment you love me!
How long such suspension may linger? Ah, Sweet,
The moment eternal -- just that and no more --
When ecstasy's utmost we clutch at the core,
While cheeks burn, arms open, eyes shut, and lips meet!

No-brainers

2009-05-01T13:27:00.002-04:00

Since Rob posted some of his lifetime pass artists, I thought I'd weigh in. I agree with Rob on the Cohens (I'm a film behind on them, too, at the moment). Alan Moore, too. Steve Martin has moved into a phase of his career in which I take him a la carte -- I'll pass on things like Cheaper By The Dozen. But if it's, say, something Martin himself wrote, I'll check it out.

And I'll toss out a few of my own:

Steve Forbert. A new album is an automatic no-brainer purchase. Hell, even a live recording is an auto-buy, regardless of the venue or the vintage. I'm at a loss to explain why this folk-rock singer-songwriter from Meridian, Mississippi, should connect so readily and so deeply for me, but I don't question it. "It's often said that life is strange, but, hey, compared to what?"

Clint Eastwood. I've not been on top of Eastwood's recent films, which is a shame. He's one of the few Hollywood folks whose work I almost whole heartedly trust. That's certainly the case with Eastwood as a director. Even when the film is just straight-up entertainment, his even-handed mastery of the craft of cinema narrative assures that I will be entertained. Eastwood learned his craft through long observation and experience with some talented folks, and perhaps that's why his films just feel good to me. His directorial style is very no-style transparent, utterly unaffected and un-effected by the jumbley short-attention-span visual trends of recent years. I'll miss him when he's gone.

Jackie Chan. Okay, there's the Hollywood pap like The Tuxedo. Hollywood's never known quite what to do with Jackie. But even in those wrong-headed vehicles, he's fun. And when Jackie's able to be Jackie, well, there's nothing like him. I wish someone would get ahold of his older films and give them a proper treatment and release on DVD. You can never have too much Jackie Chan.

J.D. Salinger. I know it's a bit weird to say, since he hasn't published any new work in my lifetime. But what there is, I like. And there is this urban myth that he's been writing the whole time he's been holed up in Cornish, New Hampshire, and that we may see more Salinger after he dies. That last bit is probably optimistically apocryphal. While it's likely enough that he may have continued to write after he stopped publishing, I think it's less likely he's lining things up to be released after his death. Still... If it shows up, I'll read it.

I'm sure a few more candidates would present themselves if I looked over my shelves.

I feel somehow...

2009-04-28T17:44:00.001-04:00

... vindicated? I'm not sure that's quite the right word, but it's the best I can come up with at the moment. I just heard the news a bit ago on NPR, and, frankly, I'm still taking it in.

Arlen Specter has become a Democrat.

Well, to put it accurately, Specter has switched party affiliation. If he'd done this a month ago, it would've been the best April-Fool's-it's-not-actually-April-Fool's for real April Fool's Day news story ever. As it is, this move is a sign that the landscape of Washington politics is still far from settled after the tectonic shift of Obama's election.

As for how this news hits me... well, we need to put things in context.

I have no party affiliation. I'm registered as such. It's a personal thing, mostly: I have such serious disagreements with the realities of the two-party system as it stands that I cannot in good conscience sign onto it. So I vote based primarily on issues and candidates, and use my own situation to illustrate the flaws in our party system. Sure, much of the time my beliefs and personal politics have me voting Democrat. But not all the time. I don't believe in voting a party ticket just because it's the party ticket. (I think that's a huge problem with the way our parties work the system now.) And over the last dozen years or so, there have been elections when the Dems seemed unable to get a strong candidate onto the ballot. When that was the case, I had to consider how to use my vote. I'll grant that it was probably never a deciding vote, but, still, it's my vote. And if the stronger candidate had no campaign policies or allegiances that might give me cause to vote against him, I'd consider voting for him. Arlen Specter is the Republican for whom I've voted.

I don't like the man personally, nor do I agree with a lot of his politics, but I know he's a capable politician. Specter himself has not always toed his party's line, so I've had some reason to believe he wouldn't lightly fall into giving his support to shortsighted initiatives simply out of party solidarity. And as far as I know, he's not a nut. In those years when the Dems weren't fielding viable candidates and the Republicans were pushing -- successfully pushing -- candidates who're blatantly unqualified, incapable, and just plain nuts, a known quantity career politician like Specter looked pretty good. I had reason to believe he wouldn't do anything stupid. Better yet, I had no cause to think he would. That's more than can be said for some other Repug senators from PA.

So, yes, I've voted for Arlen Specter. And it's like he has somehow rewarded my faith (if you can even call it that) and become the more fully realized version of the politician for whom I voted in spite of his party affiliation.

Of course, this new party affiliation is still new news. How it will play out is anyone's guess at this point. I do confess to liking some of Specter's soundbites, though -- "This is a painful decision. I know I'm disappointing many of my colleagues. The disappointment runs in both directions." Zing!

While Specter has said he's "putting principle at the top of the list," I'm full well aware that the heading on that list is Arlen Specter's Political Career. The man's sense of enlightened self-interest was part of the basis for my voting for him, after all. No one should delude himself that the Democrats are gaining a new team member. At best, a sometime ally will be less encumbered than in the past. Specter himself says, "Whatever my party affiliation, I will continue to be guided by President Kennedy’s statement that sometimes party asks too much. When it does, I will continue my independent voting and follow my conscience on what I think is best for Pennsylvania and America." Which is fine by me.

But Specter's move does spark a bit of optimism in me, though. I can't quite help seeing it the the context of the Republican Party's slow self-destruction. It's hard to keep from feeling that there's some honest truth in Specter's explanation that "as the Republican Party has moved farther and farther to the right, I have found myself increasingly at odds with the Republican philosophy and more in line with the philosophy of the Democratic Party." I've heard to-the-core Repugs assert their belief that they've lost recent elections because the Party let itself drift too middle-of-the-road, that the way to win back votes is to retreat to their "core values," to swing farther to the right. It does seem the GOP as a whole believes its future lies in appeasing this far-right base. And I've long felt that as it draws tighter to that unwavering core of dunce conservatives and rabid religious simpletons it's going to find its narrowing circle leaves more and more of its non-fanatic constituents outside its circumference.

For most of my lifetime, the GOP has defined itself by the politics of self-interest. Their conservative "christian" allies will talk in terms of issues of morality, but in most cases all that means is that the strictures of their particular "moral" cause define their own identity so entirely that their sense of self-interest demands that those strictures be totally accepted, affirmed, or at the very least thoroughly enforced. The interests this voter base possesses do not shift in response to changes in the world; that unwavering predictability is what makes them so attractive as a voter base; you only need to answer a few clearly-defined demands to win their support. The catch, of course, is that their list of deal-breakers is long and equally nonnegotiable. The politics of appeasement must eventually become the politics of exclusion. When the policies appeasing these core groups begin to exclude those on the outer rim, the party experiences internal divisiveness. Once that appeasement starts to chafe at the self-interests of those individuals on the outskirts, those not bound by allegiances of fanaticisms, the party will see those individuals drop off, driven or drawn away by the same concerns that brought or held them in the first place.

I hold no illusions about Specter's departure from the Republican Party. I resist the temptation to attach any idealism either its motivations or its repercussions. Still, I cannot wholly keep myself from hoping that there are others in the party who can shut out the noise of dismissal and condemnation within the ranks and consider -- really consider -- what's happened here, and why.

Too tired to relax

2009-04-27T16:10:00.003-04:00

I've been burning the candle at three ends for a couple of weeks already, and then Saturday the weather decided to contribute and assure that I'm as sapped of energy as I can possibly be while still walking around. I'm not walking around just now, of course. I'm blogging. Because I'm too sapped of energy to get up and wash the dishes, or do any of the other things that need doing but involve some form of walking around.

In April so far, I have:

-- Put in, teched and opened the first show in the Steinbright Stage since the lobby remodeling made a mess of that building;

-- Been seriously-dude-see-a-doctor sick with a sinus infection that may have become a chest infection may have become pneumonia;

-- Put in, teched, and opened the closing musical at PCS.

I haven't done much else, frankly. I'm exhausted, but I have such a backlog of postponed daily life business that I can't just collapse in anything like a restful way.

Just in case you were wondering, I do not in fact now have some Escher-inspired three-ended candle. It's still the same two-ended model Edna St. Vincent Millay used. So I'm not really burning the candle at three ends. I'm burning it at both ends and in the middle. It doesn't give any more light this way than it does in standard both-ends-burning mode, but it does droop rather a lot.

Ahh, Google

2009-04-03T15:14:00.002-04:00

I was hunting some photo reference through Google image and got a fun link. Some people might just think it's a odd search result, it's particularly fun for me.

I do the photo reference hunts a lot these days when I'm designing a set. There's so much on the web, it's like an exponentially bigger and more convenient search in comparison to the libraries-and-photocopies research I used to do. Indeed, it's so convenient I do it for practically everything, even though a large percentage either fails to yield helpful reference or just never gets used.

So since there's a boarding-the-trans-Atlantic-cruise-ship scene in Mack & Mable, I went hunting boarding ramps. It was easier than fast-forwarding through my old VHS of Titanic. I knew this was a bit of an oddly esoteric this to look for -- it's not the sort of thing people are likely to tag -- but the search did find several good references. It also also turned up this.

Way too cool. I wish I was twelve so I could have one.

Unintentional Sing-a-Long

2009-03-31T13:49:00.002-04:00

I love stuff out of context.

One recent example: PLTC's annual fund-raiser auction for our Project Discovery educational outreach program was last Friday night. During the champagne reception the main stage lobby gets crowded with champagne-swigging guests wandering around and scoping the assortment of items laid out in display for the silent auction portion of the evening. If you've ever been to one of these, you know the sort of things that get donated for this phase of the event -- hand-made jewelry, scarves and other accessories, small art items, and an assortment of services like a massage or a golf game at an exclusive course where the donor is a member. Bidders write their name and the amount of their bid on a form on the little clipboard in front of each item. If there's something you genuinely want, you can keep checking back throughout the reception to see if you've been out-bid, then up your bid accordingly. Bidding closes at the end of the reception, when everyone is shuffled next door for the dinner and live auction. All the silent auction stuff is resolved during dinner and the live auction, and winning bidders collect their booty at the end of the night. For intangibles like golf games, that's simply a matter of receiving information on how to arrange to redeem whatever it is. For a pair of earrings or a scarf, though, you collect the thing itself then and there. So we handle this "check-out" by setting up two lines, one for each sort. While setting things up, I came upon the sign for the latter category:

Live Redemption

I knew almost immediately what it was, but seeing it out of context initially gave me such a good laugh I felt compelled to take the sign around and share it with a few folks who would appreciate the grammatical ambiguity.

Yes, I know my sense of humor finds satisfactions in odd places.

The other example, the one that spurred this post, is a bit different. I guess it's a case of a sort of frisson between knowledge of a thing's context and the way an element of that thing appears out of context. I was channel surfing this morning at the top of the hour and stopped briefly on TCM to see what was next. Up popped the opening titles of Marty, the 1955 film. I'd seen the film years ago but had completely forgotten how... well... perky the title music is. If you know the story, the bouncey tune seems incongruous with the pathos of the isolation in the characters' lives. Ultimately, I think, the disparity is a conscious choice, playing against the underlying emotions and reflecting the veneer of okay-ness that Marty feels compelled to maintain. It's the sort of arch move I suspect wouldn't work today, but then pretty much everything about Paddy Chayefsky's story is very much of its time. The movie has a style of film music that really doesn't exist these days, overt and expressive, literal and tied very closely to the action. The music approaches storytelling with a vocabulary cinema has all but abandoned. And, damn it, that tune is catchy. Without thinking about it, I was suddenly making up lyrics.

"It's Marty, it's Marty, he's Marty.
He knows not what he wants to do.
He's loyal and faithful, not naughty,

and almost never tries anything new."

The truly bizarre part is the fact that there actually are lyrics. The closing credits, themselves done in an actor-and-character manner that was probably a bit dated even then, are presented over "Marty," the film's title song.

So I guess there are two threads to the second half of this story. One is, obviously, the fun in making up lyrics for tunes that feel like songs even if they weren't written as such. (Everyone remember Bill Murray's lounge singer spin on the Star Wars theme?)

The other is the pleasure in being reminded of a good drama that's genuinely sincere and free of irony.

Charge!

2009-03-20T12:09:00.004-04:00

A couple of weeks ago, during tech for A Tale of Two Cities, I got so frustrated with the now almost ridiculously short working time of my iBook's battery that I went hunting online for after-market replacement options. When I got the iBook G4 back in 2005, it would run on battery for around four hours, maybe even a little more if I shut off Bluetooth and wifi. These days, I get maybe thirty minutes from the time I disconnect from wall power. Just maintaining sleep cuts deep into the battery's charge; if it goes to sleep with a 100% charge, it might wake eight or ten hours later and indicate battery levels in the sixties. You can imagine how little operating time I get between waking it and needing to plug it in.

I'm not going to be able to afford anything major in the computer department in the foreseeable future. And, realistically, there's no need to upgrade the iBook. The hearty little fella's got what it takes to run OS 10.5 Leopard, although I'm still running Tiger 10.4.11 because that's the best my old snow iMac can handle and it's been easier to keep the two in synch when they're both running the same OS. In praise of snowy, I have to say he handles Tiger pretty well, considering that he's a G3, 500 MHz PowerPC 750, a full processor generation previous to the 1.42 GHz G4 in my iBook. (Yes, I bought my iBook barely a month before the first Intel-based iBooks shipped. At the back of the Apple Store in the King of Prussia Mall, behind the counter, there's a red phone that's a direct line to an office in Cupertino, California. Whenever I buy something, the tee-shirted Apple acolyte who sold it to me waits until I'm out of sight and then hurries straight to that phone to report. Two to six weeks later, the new version of whatever I've just bought is released. Seriously. I think it was only a week or two after I'd bought my 30 GB iPod that the next generation came out, with 10 GB more capacity for the same price. Not that I really experience any need for more room on the iPod I have. I'm just sayin'.) I swapped snowy's RAM up its maximum of 1 GB before upgrading from Panther to Tiger, an extremely easy bit of business that testifies to the fact that the advancements in form factor and friendliness after Jobs' return included internal design as well as external. Although things sometimes move a little slower on snowy than they do on the iBook, the performance lag is usually not enough to be a real bother. Sure, Dashboard's a bit jerky, and the current iTunes has features that are effectively a waste on this machine. I know some of that is processor speed, but since the most prominent (and annoying) sluggishness manifests in rendering busy web pages, particularly those with lots of Flash clutter which never runs smoothly anyway, I suspect much is a result of limitations with snowy's graphics card. No drama. I can live without being able to watch video in iTunes on my iMac.

I'll likely bite the bullet soon and start running Leopard on my iBook, though. The two Macs we have at work now -- a MacBook Pro and a sexy Mac Pro (purchased only a few weeks before the most recent upgrade came out, which I can only see as further proof of that red phone) -- are both running the current 10.5.6, and there's just enough difference between that and Tiger that I'm finding switching from one interface to the other, which I'm sometimes doing with my machine sitting right next to the Leopard machine, slighting jarring. So I'm weighing that inconvenience against the inconvenience of juggling the two operating systems at home.

I'm also thinking ahead to my eventual entry into the iPhone cult, at which point solid synching between my iPhone and my primary Mac (which is now my iBook, really) will be the defining concern. I expect that will want, perhaps require, that my iBook run the most up-to-date OS. Everything that was mac.com is now MobileMe. Although I've not had any substantial hiccups with my old Dot-Mac stuff that transition, I don't think everything will mesh as cleanly once I introduce a third element into the equation, especially if that third element is of a different generation than the other two. So the iPhone will probably push my jump to Leopard.

At which time Snow Leopard will almost immediately begin shipping.

Looking ahead toward running current Leopard on my iBook, though, I'm thinking of bumping up its original 1 GB of RAM up to its maximum 1.5 GB. Its original configuration is 512 MB in the slot in addition to the permanent 512 MB on the board. At the time I bought it, the cost of putting a 1 GB DIMM in that slot was a lot more than the 512MB I went with. But memory gets cheaper, and the price for a 1GB DIMM is good deal less than it was. Since I'm not looking at a new machine for a while, it's worth a moderate investment to maximize what I can get out of the one I have. From what I can tell, performing a DIY swap of the DIMM shouldn't be too hard on this iBook.

But all this started out as an anecdote about my new battery (which, incidentally, has been powering the iBook during the entire time I've been tapping out this particular ramble, including breaks to answer e-mail and my other distracting sidetracks around the InterWeb). After shopping around a bit online, I decided to get a replacement battery from Newer Technology. Obviously, Apple isn't making the battery for my iBook at this point, but there are a lot of third-party options that claim to be OEM replacements. I did find a site selling used original Apple batteries, but I have to feel that another used battery would at best be the equivalent sending my own original battery back in time a year or two: it's still a three- or four-year-old battery. Some of the third-party options felt a little iffy to me. I'm sure Laptops-for-Less employs some very nice people, but I got a bad vibe.

So I received my new battery, but had to wait a few days before my schedule had an open span of time long enough to devote the iBook to conditioning the battery with a charge-discharge-charge cycle in the way the manufacturer advised. I've heard the typical nay-sayers dismiss the idea of conditioning for rechargeable batteries, but in battery units like this there's sometimes more at work than the simple chemical reactions of a charge. While Lithium-ion batteries don't suffer from memory effect the same way Ni-Cad batteries do, the literature on the NuPower battery I bought says the electronics that monitor charging and report working levels use a full cycle as a reference. Okay. What the Hell? I'll begin by following instructions.

And the instructions say the discharge portion of a conditioning cycle wants to drain the battery all the way in continuous use. Charge it for twelve hours, drain it, then let it charge to 100% again. So here's the bit that spurred this whole rambling top-heavy post. It's silly, but it did make me laugh. Whoever wrote the instructions here was sensitive to the fact that someone might for whatever reason want to get through the middle phase of this conditioning cycle as quickly as possible. Accordingly, they offered this suggestion:

You may accelerate this process by running applications to boost processor and hard disk usage. Playing a CD on shuffle in iTunes with full visuals turned on is a good way of draining the battery quickly.

I think it's the understatement the did it for me.

Like a Pirate in a pawnshop with a pocket full of jewels...

2009-03-09T12:31:00.003-04:00

There's this album -- CD? Disc? What the Hell do we call these things now? -- I've been listening to an awful lot lately. I mean a lot. As in get-to-the-end-and-press-PLAY-again a lot. That kind of a lot. It's Hope For The Hopeless from Brett Dennen. Compulsively listenable, with a bunch of bits that stay stuck in your head enough to make you learn all the lyrics just so you're not trapped in a tiny loop of a single phrase.

I like this album a lot. As in get-to-the-end-and-press-PLAY-again a lot. You get the idea. It had me hooked from the first track, "San Francisco," one of the most upbeat breakup songs ever. Upbeat? Hell, positively perky. I had the CD with me on the trip to-and-from Rob & Kathy's a while ago, and it was the only thing I listened to on the drive home. Just pressed PLAY again every time it got to the end.

I bought the first Brett Dennen album a while back, as an impulse buy at, I think, Best Buy. The cover art caught my eye, and I guess the song titles sounded cool. More than anything else, though, I got a feeling about it. And the CD was Best Priced. So I picked it up, and I liked it. Some of the tracks I liked quite a lot, but the disc as a whole wasn't a play-it-over-&-over discovery.

Still, I liked his stuff enough to purchase a couple of singles and EP specials when they popped up on iTunes. One of them made it onto my Christmas mix-disc. And I bought his next album, So Much More, when it came out. So, yeah, I was liking Brett Dennen a fair bit.

So of course I ordered Hope For The Hopeless when the hit-or-miss Recommendations features on iTunes and Amazon told me it was coming out. That title certainly hit home: Yeah, I could sure use some hope these days. For me, this turned out to be his 100% album. Every song on it makes me happy. Even the songs that make me sad make me feel sort of happy, in that strange way art transubstantiates sorrow. I've yet to encounter a mood in which I want to skip a track when I'm listening to it. Some of the songs were special on first listen and have since become dear to my heart.

From everything I've read, Brett is wonderful live. Unfortunately, he's based on the west coast and all his performance dates seem to be there. (His site does list what looks like a tour sweep through Ireland and the UK, but that's not a lot of help to me.) From the way his music has been popping up in the song tracks of a few TV shows, and the fact that I've heard him on radio, I suspect he's about to shift out of the cool-private-discovery category. Whatever. That's happened to a few of my cool-private-discovery artists before, and it hasn't made me appreciate their work any less; it's just made things feel a little less personal sometimes. But with Brett Dennen, as with some others, I'll always know I found them on my own. Publicity machines weren't really responsible. Their own popularity didn't even have much to do with it. Through whatever confluence of factors, I was drawn to their work, sometimes before even hearing any of it.

Thinking about that with Dennen has me thinking about other artists -- in particular, singer/songwriters -- who I've discovered through the same sort of impulse of curiosity. In some cases, those have turned out to be my favorites.

I've been thinking about those, and also about other albums that have been as listenable as Hope is. In some cases, they're the same albums. Some are albums by artists I've found in that way, even if they're not the same album as the intial discovery; even with artists I love, some albums stand out.

Then there are the odd albums, the equivilent of one-hit wonders, which caught me on their own and have an appeal much stronger than anything else from those same artists. These are albums, often impulse buys or odd discoveries, which have appealed to me enough to spur me to explore the rest of the artist's work only to find that nothing else they've done clicks with me the same way. I still like those individual albums as lot; they just didn't result in an enduring connection.

Anyway, I may wander though some of those albums in the coming days, week, months or whatever the increments in which my posts here may creep ahead. You can take them as recommendations, if you want. Mainly, though, it'll just be me sharing some things that make me happy.

Baby, it's cold outside...

2009-03-02T09:56:00.003-05:00

So I've been procrastinating shoveling the snow, and wasting time online is great for that sort of thing. I'm procrastinating in part out of pique -- the offices have today off as a snow day, but those of us in production need to keep to a real schedule, regardless of weather. The only time snow effected my production schedule was during an official declared Snow Emergency, when the lighting designer couldn't get out of NYC to get here for a focus session. So I've gotta dig out and face whatever the roads are like and get my chilly butt into the theatre, because we begin tech week rehearsals tomorrow at noon and everything needs to be ready. And the office staff folk get to sit at home, nice and cozy, and catch up on their reading or their laundry or whatever.

Thus, pique.

But mostly I've been procrastinating because I hate shoveling. Truthfully, I don't mind 75% of winter weather woes. I like snow. It's pretty, and not nearly so uncomfortable to be out in as rain. And I genuinely enjoy cold, at least until winds bring the -chill factor down into the single digit range. Then, not so much. But I simply hate shoveling snow. Hate it. Hate hate hate.

Thus, procrastination.

Ah, well. Needs must.

On a completely different topic, I commented on Rob's blog twice during my procrastination. Both times I got real actual words for the security confirmation thingy. Usually there're just clusters of hard-to-read characters. Is this something new, or just a very very odd fluke?

Wait. I'm still procrastinating.

Dammit!

The best 43:26 the interweb ever gave us

2009-02-16T22:07:00.007-05:00

If I haven't personally endorsed it to you nose-to-nose, this simple recommendation cannot convey the deep and satisfying giddiness this wonderful little chunk of unalloyed entertainment makes me feel.

I'm not even going to begin listing the reasons to love Dr. Horrible, although when I started enumerating them in my head it began to sound like a list a should put in a personals ad. (Except maybe for the PhD in horribleness...)

We've got cabin fever...!

2009-02-03T17:29:00.003-05:00

Okay, so the snow itself isn't so big a deal. But my truck is still in the shop, and the snow falling outside my window is really punching up the effect of my being trapped in the house.

And, as is always the case when I spend an entire day at home, I'm reminded that I really don't have any food in the house other than breakfast food.

Where I live and breathe

2009-01-13T21:25:00.003-05:00

Facebook can be freaky scary. This popped up today:

How did it know? How?

Maybe

2009-01-12T21:14:00.002-05:00

So I'm thinking I ought to have put my cell phone number on the letter to Entertainment Weekly.

I got home Friday evening and found a message on the answering machine. Someone had called from EW to confirm permission to print my letter. I called back, and got voice mail; I also e-mailed a reply.

It's Monday night, and I've not heard back again.

So don't know whether I'll be in a future issue of EW. Those who read EW regularly (Rob!), could you let me know if I pop up?

Who knows? This could be the start of my pathetic life as a letter hack.

Dear Mister Editor...

2009-01-04T21:27:00.002-05:00

So, yeah, this was something I'd never done before. This afternoon, I wrote a letter (well, an e-mail) to Entertainment Weekly. Mark Harris has a column in this week's issue in which he laments the way Hollywood has come to equate "movie star" status with box office performance. I like the definition he proposes (quoted below), and it got me thinking enough to dash off a letter of support. I don't know if it'll ever see print, so I thought I'd share it here:

Mark Harris' column "What Stars Are For" (#1029) taps a rich vein in Hollywood's legacy. "A movie star is someone whose past work enriches your experience of, and deepens your pleasure in, his or her present work." Indeed. Just a short list of examples provides a range of great films. There's Paul Newman in The Color of Money (1986), revisiting Eddie Felson a quarter-century after The Hustler (1961). There's the unique familial frisson of Jane Fonda playing daughter to her father, the aged but unfaded Henry Fonda, in On Golden Pond (1981). That welcome baggage is now there in every Hepburn & Tracey film, never more luminouly than in Guess Who's Coming To Dinner (1967). And, obviously and indelibly, there's Gloria Swanson in Sunset Blvd. (1950).

But I can think of no example more poignant than the singular heft John Wayne brought to The Shootist (1976). While some may think first of the parallels between his character's cancer and Wayne's own lost battles with the disease, I find the deepest resonance in the ways Wayne plays with, off of and sometimes against his own iconic presence in the history of the Hollywood Western. At a time when American cinema had begun questioning and deconstructing the conventions of the genre, with films like The Wild Bunch (1969), Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971) and The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976), Wayne's performance as J.B. Books, an aging gunslinger past his prime and pondering his past, is informed and enriched by Wayne's own career. No other actor -- no other movie star -- could have given this role what John Wayne brought to it simply by being John Wayne.

Didn't Anyone Get Five?

2008-12-28T15:53:00.003-05:00

This occurred to me a while ago, and it seemed a bit odd. I guess what felt really odd is that I'd never thought of it before. Everyone remember this:

Three Rings for the Elven-kings under the sky,
Seven for the Dwarf-lords in their halls of stone,
Nine for Mortal Men doomed to die,
One for the Dark Lord on his dark throne
In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.
One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them,
One Ring to bring them all & in the darkness bind them
In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.

That's a big jump, three to seven. What about five? The pattern would seem to be a progression of adding two to the previous number of rings: one, three, five, seven, nine. But there's no five in the Verse of The Ring. We go from Elves to Dwarves, jumping from three to seven. Did someone get five rings and we're not being told about it? I mean, if the progression were one, three, six, nine, that would make a little more sense. Surely Tolkien didn't go with seven for the Dwarf-lords just because he needed the extra syllable to make the line scan.

There is the fact that the numbers chosen -- three, seven, nine -- are more "loaded" than five; each has its own mystical or totemic resonance. In Biblical association, three connects to the Trinity; it also reflects the days between Christ's death and resurrection. The number seven in Hebrew comes from the root word meaning "complete" or "full." There are seven cardinal virtues, and seven deadly sins. Nine is the third perfect square, whose root is itself three; it is the first square not evenly divisible; it is the last single-digit number, signifying the ending of one thing before the beginning of a new phase. Nine is a significant number in Norse mythology: Odin hung himself on an ash tree for nine days to learn the runes. Jesus appears nine times to his disciples and apostles after his resurrection.

I'm discounting the One Ring from such consideration, because the very point of the One Ring is that it's the One Ring -- it's a singular entity.

When I find myself devoting this much thought to things like this (never mind noticing them in the first place), I sometimes think I ought to have stayed in academia...

Stupid Grinch

2008-12-24T17:54:00.002-05:00

For a few years now, I've had this little table-top Christmas tree with fiber-optic light. I've seen various permutations on this idea, from plain white to shifting colors. Mine is one of the latter; there's a single light source in the base, and between it and the fiber cluster in the tree's "trunk" there's a little motorized color wheel; as the wheel turns, the different colors flow around on the tree. It's a little trippy, and I quite like it. As color-changing trees go, I think it's better than most, in part because of a very basic bit of cleverness in its construction: as the fibers break out from the central bundle, they're dispersed somewhat randomly and as a result the flow of colors is nicely broken up and there's little discernible sense of the color disc's rotation. Conveniently, there's no real decoration involved, and very little setup -- just put it on the table, plug it in, turn it on and it sits there all shimmery and festive.

Except tonight, because the lamp's burnt out. On Christmas Eve. Even if I were inclined to venture out and hunt for a replacement lamp, I'm not sure that I'd be able to find one. It's a little MR16 lamp, 20W 12v, so there's little chance of its being stocked at, say, the corner CVS. Perhaps at Home Depot.

The cruel thing is that there's a fair chance I might have a replacement for this sitting on a shelf at work. Maybe a 25W, but I can't imagine 5 watts would matter much.

More to the point, it's Christmas Eve and my Christmas Tree doesn't light.

Ho-ho-hum.

Tagged!

2008-12-22T14:51:00.003-05:00

Rob tagged me with this. So:

Cool, huh? Here's what I'm supposed to be doing:

The rules:

1) Take a picture of yourself right NOW!

2) DON'T change your clothes, DON'T fix your hair... Just take a picture.

3) Post that picture with NO editing.

4) Post these instruction with your picture.

5)Tag 10 people to do this..

These things tend to sputter out with me, but I'm so filled with the Yuletide Spirit that I felt I ought at least do the basics. Four out of five ain't too bad.
Thing is, the camera on my phone doesn't work very well these days. It may not be wholly in keeping with the strictures of the thing, but I gave it another shot:

That's my Christmas wreath there, creeping over my shoulder and wishing everyone happy holidays.

Found Editorial Comment

2008-12-20T11:12:00.003-05:00

This has been sitting on my phone since I saw it on November 5th or 6th.

It may have been posed, but it wasn't posed by me.

R.I.P.

2008-12-17T15:37:00.003-05:00

I’ve been meaning to post something on this for a while now.

About a month ago, Springfield Video, a little independent video rental place on Saxer Avenue, closed. Saxer is a two-block-long bit of suburban main street in Springfield, a bit vestigial these days. When I was a kid, living five or six blocks away, Saxer had a real character – it had Harnet’s, an old-style 5&10¢ store where you could get water-ice in the warmer months and a whole assortment of other stuff year-round, a pharmacy, a couple of pizza places, two barber shops and Dukes, a bar with one small window above head height. My elementary school was at one end of the street, across from the town’s volunteer fire company’s firehouse, and there’s a trolley stop at the other end. The occupants of the street’s storefronts have changed over the years, and sometime – probably in the mid or late ’80s – Springfield Video opened.

I never had an account to rent there. It wasn’t all that convenient to home and, anyway, my working at Movies Unlimited made paying to rent anywhere else pointless. But Springfield Video was there, and actually lasted past the point when the Movies Unlimited store where I’d worked had closed its doors.

At the blooming of the home video revolution, these mom-and-pop video stores sprang up all over the place. Some of the more enterprising were small chains (anyone remember Erol’s? West Coast?), but anyone with some startup cash could open their own place. And, gee, you could rent a movie on VHS or Beta and watch it at home. Cool. If the place had a fair amount of operating capital, it might even sell movies, although Hollywood was slow to buy in to the idea of selling films, and those early sell-through titles were confined to major hit films, which had already made the studio a profit and for which there was a likely purchase audience, and even then were pretty pricey.

The rental business model was always a little odd, when considered in retrospect. You were spending something between $40 and $80 for a tape of a movie and had to recoup your investment and make a profit in increments of only a few dollars for each rental turn. You wanted to have multiple copies of new hot titles right when they came out and demand was high; during those first weeks, you couldn’t keep these on the shelves; after a while, though, they just sat there. Who needs twenty or thirty copies of Twister once most people have seen it? So you’d sell the previously viewed tapes at some arbitrary self-determined price in the hope of making some last bit of money off that initial investment. Keep a couple of copies to build a library of stock titles for occasional rental. Picking up a few movies for the weekend became a Friday night ritual for a lot of folk, and when the title they wanted wasn’t available (you could never have too many copies of the hot stuff) people would browse for second choices just so the trip to the video store wouldn’t have been for naught.

The industry evolved as it grew. Big national chains with large amounts of working capital carved themselves a space as the go-to venders for renting new titles, stocking tons of copies and eventually offering an assortment of in-stock guarantees. They had the money to buy vast numbers of those titles and in time the giants, primarily Blockbuster, struck their own deals with distributors and studios. The tapes themselves were no longer viewed strictly as a consumer item, and the big chains began treating them as a medium for renting a given title, a medium that was ultimately disposable. Studios and distributors even bought into that business model, offering large volume buy-back deals that allowed the rental dealer to return tapes for a small percentage of their initial cost.

This shift effectively squeezed small independent stores out of possible competition in stocking new titles – they simply did not have the capital or credit clout to deal in the same sort of volume as Blockbuster. A lot of the independents closed; some of the smaller chains were absorbed by larger ones, the rest folded. Those few that survived did so by not trying to compete head-to-head with Blockbuster, but rather angling themselves into a sort of niche market that valued a deeper library of titles more than availability of the latest releases. Stores developed their individual characters and some, like TLA and Movies Unlimited, continued more deeply into the potential market for selling titles, focusing on mail-order and publishing their own catalogues of titles available for purchase. In the case of Movies Unlimited, the yearly catalogue became a virtual reference book of movies in print.

And I think almost all of those folk who survived incorporated one other thing into their operations: porn.

Even as home video was creating an entirely new industry, it was transforming the existing industry of pornography. No longer did you have to skulk into an “adult theater” to see a porn film. You could watch a XXX movie in the privacy and masturbation-safe security of your own home. On the other end of things, the production and distribution of porn saw new opportunities in video. One no longer needed to invest in prints to distribute a film – release it on video. An established distribution apparatus wasn’t even necessary – sell the tapes yourself, mail-order. People had Hustler delivered to their homes. Why not porn on VHS? Indeed, one no longer needed to actually film a porn film; recording directly to video made the production radically less complex and expensive.

Just as Adult Films were working their way into wider public visibility, if not viewing, the industry saw a new direction that was rich in potential profit. And profit is the uncontested driving force of the porn business; no one’s claiming fidelity to artistic integrity in making dirty movies. The thread of XXX filmmaking that had worked its way into the fabric of popular culture was soon snipped off. Want evidence of the fact? Everyone knows at least two pre-1980 porn films by title: Debbie Does Dallas (1978) and, thanks to Watergate, Deep Throat (1973). Can anyone name any the most popular or profitable porn titles of the past ten years?

Yeah, porn is profitable. But that profitability comes with its own costs, one of which is controversy. If you wanted to build a mammoth presence in the home video market, you needed the kind of public visibility in which dealing in pornography would be a considerable liability. Picture your local Blockbuster being picketed by righteous religious protesters and concerned mothers. No way is the profit worth that cost.

So the big chains steered well clear of porn, leaving it the exclusive province of small independent stores. And since they weren’t competing to under-price larger stores, the independents could charge more for their porn then they did for the titles they shared with the big chains. Sometimes a lot more. Sex is a seller’s market. And so porn helped keep a lot of independent video dealers in business, until another technological development came along to transform the video industry that had only come into being barely more than twenty years earlier.

The effect of the internet on the porn industry is so generally known and universally acknowledged that it’s a common joke. Porn online offers two things that buying movies through the mail or even renting them from your corner video store can’t: increased anonymity and almost instant gratification. Don’t schlep all the way to the video store, where you have to wonder of the store’s staff joke about your selection after you leave (we often did) or – worse – risk running into your daughter’s kindergarten teacher as you’re coming out of that back room. Just go online, provide your credit card information, and get some streaming video right there on your desktop computer. The niche market that had helped independent video business survive suddenly cracked wide open. No one could hope to offer anything like the selection available online and, while I expect there are some hard-core exceptions, the aficionado social appeal of neighborhood video stores was never an element with porn customers.

To all this, add the advent of the DVD. Suddenly – seemingly overnight – VHS has vanished from the consumer landscape. Everything is DVD. It took a little while (probably for the expense of mastering to drop), but now even porn is becoming available on DVD. What does this mean for the small stores with large and varied VHS libraries for rent? The cost of replacing hundreds of titles with copies in a new format is prohibitibly imposing. When older catalogue titles do become available on DVD, they’re almost always released at prices that make impulse purchase quite tempting, and internet vendors make them almost ridiculously easy to find. Feel like watching the first Die Hard movie again as a Christmas season alternative? Blockbuster might have it on DVD. Feel like watching the original Christmas in Connecticut or The Bishop’s Wife? Blockbuster might not have either of these, but you can buy both on Amazon for under $25, with free shipping. Or you can use another internet option and rent them online, delivered and returned by mail, postage included in the fee. Or, in the case of Die Hard and The Bishop’s Wife, you can pay to watch it online, right now.

Internet commerce is making a sea change in the home video business as a whole, further squeezing out little stand-alone businesses. When you can go online and Netflix (a company name already becoming a verb) a few titles, either popular or obscure with equal convenience, and have them in your mailbox in a day or two, then watch another title online or on-demand if you have digital television service, then click on over to another sight and indulge your voyeuristic impulse, the appeal of the small local video store is almost inevitably diminished if not wholly erased. No wonder Movies Unlimited is now confined to its mail-order business. No wonder TLA Video is surviving through trading exclusively on its odd dual-identity of porn dealer and specialist in art films. No wonder that little shop on Saxer Avenue is gone.

Redundant Much?

2008-12-17T13:28:00.002-05:00

Saw this the other day while pumping gas for under $1.75 per gallon...

Off The Hook

2008-11-25T12:35:00.002-05:00

One problem with having a day off and spending most of it around the house is that I need to actively opt to ignore phone spam. I know it's not much of an effort. Actually, I know it's mostly a passive thing -- I just choose to not answer the phone. But I'm here when it rings, damn it, and that makes it actively intrusive.

There're reasons door-to-door salesmen died out...

p.s. -- Eric Schwartz has a cathartically venomous song about this, which (not surprisingly) is not readily available on his website.

Greg wonders...

2008-11-24T12:52:00.003-05:00

... why are there no classic Warner Bros. cartoons on TV these days?

Of course, I could be wrong about this. It may be that I've not stumbled across them. But I have a day off from work today, and the TV is blathering in the background for company as I get things done around the house (or, as is the case at the moment, procrastinate by wasting time online) and in my aimless channel surfing I passed some old MGM Tom & Jerry cartoons. (I also passed something on USA that featured the hilarious out-of-context line "That woman is a Godless multiculturalist.") The Tom & Jerry made me think, "hey, I haven't seen Looney Tunes or any such on TV in quite a while," and got me to wondering why?

There's a little empty spot in my soul, which aches to be filled periodically by Bugs Bunny. And muppets.

Later, Canada

2008-11-04T23:10:00.001-05:00

A day may come, but that day is not today.

Werewolves and Spaceships

2008-10-27T22:30:00.002-04:00

No, this isn't a pirates versus ninjas sort of post, nor even a cavemen versus astronauts sort of a post. It's simply an admission, and a complaint in the form of a question.

I'll freely admit that there are situations in which I just keep banging my head against the wall. In terms of movies those situations often involve spaceships or werewolves. I'll watch pretty much anything with spaceships in it. This undiscerning willingness has resulted in my sitting through mind-numbing crap like Supernova and soul-abrading shit like Event Horizon. There were spaceships.

I'm the same way about werewolves. I really, really want to see a really, really great werewolf movie. Really. Maybe someday I will. In the meanwhile, I watch crappy werewolf movies in a futile attempt to fill the lycanthropic void in my soul.

So I popped Skinwalkers into my Netflix que and tried not to hope. And even though I should have known better -- did know better -- I still find myself feeling disappointed and wondering why -- why -- no one can make a good werewolf movie.

Oh, and if there's a movie out there with spaceships and werewolves, I will watch it. I know it will almost certainly be terrible, but I'll watch it.

Three Little Words

2008-10-27T22:10:00.002-04:00

I'm not a single-issue voter by any stretch. Yeah, there are a few deal-breakers, but to be honest they're almost always moot because they tend to align with a whole lot of other issues. So I keep finding it a bit odd and very, very sad that with all of the serious and complex issues one ought to consider, this presidential election reduces to just three words.

President Sarah Palin.

We cannot risk it. Seriously. That is just not a chance we can take.

End of discussion.

Off to Fest...

2008-08-13T13:32:00.004-04:00

Well, I'm off to encamp at the Philadelphia Folk Festival.

Got me a new tent, plus an air mattress. Combine those plush new accommodations with the weather forecast, and we might have a pretty comfortable Fest.

And, yes, Brian is coming with me again this year.

Only one question remains:

Who will make us mojitos?

Pitch it!

2008-08-06T21:12:00.004-04:00

After weeks (yes, weeks) of on-and-off shopping online, reading reviews and running comparisons, I finally settled on my new tent. I actually went to REI and set it up before I bought it. REI is great like that -- they think nothing of your asking to pitch a tent in their store. Which other niche retailers can you say that about? (Other than Victoria's Secret, obviously.)

Temporary home, sweet can-almost-stand-up-in-it home.

Back in Town

2008-07-30T00:26:00.002-04:00

It's nice to have Sci-Fi Channel's EUREKA back for a while. It's a fun show.

But, damn, am I awaiting the season finale of Doctor Who. When an episode has the title "Journey's End," with all the major cliff-hangers we have going into this one, the ominous gets turned up to eleven.

Just who are the big kids, anyway?

2008-07-24T11:03:00.004-04:00

Maybe I'm just a smug, arrogant bastard with nothing but attitude to support my opinions. I mean, that's wholly possible and I'm not about to deny that it is. But the fact is that it bugs the Hell out of me when I see (never mind have to watch) someone doing things the wrong way.

Well, to be honest, it doesn't always bug me. There are times it quite amuses me. If it has to do with theatre, though, it's almost certain that it won't be one of those times.

Some context: During the soft weeks at my full-time job, I picked up a side-gig at Playpenn, this great little mini-festival of new plays in Philly. They're workshopped for a few rehearsals, then presented as staged readings. I'm serving as technical director for the Playground, one of the two spaces Playpenn uses at the Adrienne Theatre. As these are supposed to be staged readings, one would expect them to involve minimal tech. That has not always been the case; hence this post.

The basics are already done: lights were hung and focused before we began working in the space; it's a predetermined repertory plot shared by all the shows in my space, with a maximum of two refocusable specials, so focus was pretty much a one-shot deal. Enough spare instruments were available to allow me to actually hang all the specials as individual units, so rather than re-focus from show to show, I just jump on a stepladder and re-circuit to the appropriate instrument. At this point, a day or two from performance, there are only a few sound cues. For the most part, I've been sitting in on rehearsals, waiting to answer questions or respond to needs, and getting to know the shows.

On the readings which involve an appropriately basic amount of tech, I don't have much to do. Mostly I sit and watch the rehearsal process, which is a bit unusual since the text is still in flux. In one case, I've found that engaging and educational. Watching the different ways the three actors in the show adjust to day-to-day changes in the script is interesting; they're three distinct ways. And it's educational to see how the playwright adjusts in response to things revealed in seeing the show on its feet, even in this spare book-in-hand performance.

And then there are the shows that are fighting the reality of their being staged readings. Rather, I ought to say, the shows whose directors are fighting or just plain ignoring the realities of the fact that they're staged readings. Granted, some of the plays, those whose narrative involves a lot of physicality, are not themselves particularly amenable to the stylized limits of book-in-hand performance. Those plays challenge the director to make decisions about what to attempt to convey in limited performed physicality, what gets read by an offstage narrator, and what just gets skipped. Those can be tough decisions, and it's frustrating to watch a director who lacks the conviction to commit to their choices, or the guts to choose in the first place.

You end up with a reading that takes place on a bare stage cluttered with an assortment of "necessary" props and orphan scenic elements; actors wear pieces suggestive of costumes; the occasional light or sound cue floats in painfully evident isolation, a statement without a vocabulary. Nothing is consistent throughout. The poor actors are stuck mixing mime and literal props, juggling the latter with loose leaf scripts in binders or flopping pages held together with a binder ring or two. The end result feels -- to me, at least -- a bit half-assed. Worse, it gives the impression of being distrustful of the audience's imagination. I think I'd prefer a straight-up no-frills reading: actors on stools or chairs, sitting behind music stands with the script, performing with essential narration read aloud. It shows trust; trust in the audience; trust in the words.

And I think an absence of trust is an aspect of the sort of situation that frustrates me most. This isn't limited to a staged reading situation. I have to sit through it all the time in rehearsals for full productions. And it drives me nuts. Simply and harshly put, it's this: watching "directors" who can't direct Direct.

On a purely pragmatic level, it's an offensive lack of consideration for any sort of time management. When this gets really bad, you can tell by watching the actors; they disengage whenever they're not directly involved; it would be unreasonably and pointlessly tiring to maintain a constant attentive presence. The stage manager looks at her watch, flips ahead through pages, looks at the time again, and sighs. The tech folks thank God for wi-fi, go online and post on their blogs. And when the director is finally informed of how little time remains in the rehearsal, he gushes distress, despair and confusion that we didn't get to all the scenes he'd meant to work on.

But what frustrates me most of all is the fact that almost all the time they're wasting is actually wasted. They work the same bits over and over and over again, without any real progress, often without any clear sense of what they're working toward. Most of the time they don't outright set a goal, and when they do they never trust the actors to find their way to it on their own. Sometimes they're able to elucidate the perceived problem they want to solve, which can makes things even more maddening for me when it's obvious that the stuff they're doing does not at all address the problem as they've expressed it. They might actually be seeing a real problem, but haven't a sense of its causes or a clue how to move towards a solution. And that is, I think, because they don't know how the thing they're tinkering with works.

These are, almost consistently, directors with what Huck Finn might describe as "a terrible lot of book-learnin'." Their understanding of theatre is entirely academic. Everything is in abstract. They don't act, have never acted, and don't really know or understand acting. They're not writers, or at least not playwrights, themselves. They don't know or understand any of the technical aspects of stagecraft (but nevertheless have definite opinions, regardless of the fact that they usually haven't the vocabulary to communicate then, and try to concern themselves with tech to an extent so inappropriate that it would be embarrassing if they had any sense of their own ineptitude). The truth is, they know nothing except How To Direct. Which means, frankly, they know nothing. Their attempts at actual stagecraft are like a literary critic trying to fix a broken printing press. They may have a sense of what they want to see in the end product, but they've no idea how it gets there or where it comes from. And they are willfully oblivious to the limits of their knowledge, as well as to the possibility of anyone else's possessing any. They never -- never -- simply ask for something and trust that you know your job well enough to make it happen. They rarely are trusting enough to risk putting a problem on the table and being open to other people's takes on it or ideas about solutions. The one How To Direct thing they don't know how to do is direct. It's as though they've a wholly isolated definition of the job. They seem unaware of and resistant to the idea that what a director does is direct -- make sure that everyone involved is headed in the same direction. A good director doesn't control; he directs; he keeps a group of people with divers talents unified. You don't tell the herd how to walk, you just keep them together and moving in the same direction. When a really good director is on his game, the destination doesn't even need to be clearly defined -- you discover it when you get there.

But that's not the case with these book-learnin' Directors. They talk about process, but they don't trust it. They act like architects when what they need to be is gardeners. Lacking an understanding of how things operate, they start fiddling with things that may have no relation to the thing they want to change. They keep flipping the tape cassette over, pressing play, fast-forwarding, pressing rewind, flipping the cassette again, trying to get the thing to play Mozart when all's that recorded on the tape is Queen's Greatest Hits.

I like Queen. I like Mozart. But no amount of tinkering with the one is going to get you the other. And watching someone try with ignorant determination to make that happen is just plain painful.

Check, check... is this thing on?

2008-07-13T14:07:00.005-04:00

A bit ago, Rob blogged this list of 100 books. It's popping up here and there. Like so much else on the web, its origins are murky. But, being the bibliophile and unrepentant English Major that I am, I had to comment in some way.

There are a number of problems with this list. For one, I can't see any discernable order to the thing. Pride and Prejudice at #1? Charlie and the Chocolate Factory above Les Miserables? Then there're the couple of "repeats" - listing a group of books and then listing a single work out of that group. Classic interweb sloppiness.

Still, I'm starting with the list as I found it on Rob's site and elsewhere.

Books I've read are in bold; books I intend to read are in italics; books which I intend to read and own, but haven't got to yet, are in blue italics. (There are an alarming number of that last class, owing to the years of my inveterate used book sale attendance.) I'll toss in a rating of affection, too, I guess; that's my fondness for the book, which may not always correspond with my opinion of its importance.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen ***
2 The Lord of the Rings - J.R.R. Tolkien *****
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte ****
4 Harry Potter series - J.K. Rowling *** to ***** depending on the book
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee ****
6 The Bible (I've read bits, but not enough to bold it. I'll probably never read the whole thing, though. One can only bear so many begats.)
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell (I may have read this in school. I know an awful lot about it. But I cannot recall actually having read it.)
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman (I'm saying recorded books count, here and elsewhere, so long as the recordings are unabridged.)
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M. Alcott
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller (A gaping lacuna in my reading; I think there may even be an old book-sale copy somewhere around my house, waiting...)
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (A cop-out, indeed. Why not The Complete Works of Jane Austen? With the exception of Northanger Abby, I think they're all here.I've read more than the typical selection of the plays, some many times, and a good number of the sonnets, but I am not trudging through all the histories just for the sake of "completeness." I'm bolding it anyway.)
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - J.R.R. Tolkien *****
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger ****
19 The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell (I have my father's copy, but doubt I'll ever actually read it.)
22 The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald *****("and so we beat on, boats against the current, born back ceaselessly into the past")
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams ****
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh *****
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll (I've never understood the appeal. I love the doggerel verse, but the books themselves...)
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame (I don't know how I never read this when I was a kid. Maybe I was put off by a frog on the cover.)
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 The Chronicles of Narnia - C.S. Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen ***
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - C.S. Lewis (And here we have the first of the odd "repeats." I'm bolding it as well, though, as it's one of the Narnia books I'm certain I've read more than once.)
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - A.A. Milne ***
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown (WTF?!? What is this doing here? It's bolded, though, because I listened to it unabridged.)
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez (I ought to give Garcia Marquez another shot. I've begun this book at least twice, set it aside "until I was more in that mode," and let it lie. I think I still have my copy somewhere...)
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving (This and Cider House Rules are the two important Irvings I've yet to read; I own copies of both.)
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins (Whoa. Collins is tough going. I tried The Moonstone years ago, without success. He's important from an historical perspective; as to the innate value of his individual novels... I cannot say.)
46 Anne of Green Gables - L.M. Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy (There's a college literature professor out there who thinks I read this, and I very well may have - much of that course is a blur...)
48 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens ****
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck ****
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt ****(For a while this was my give-it-to-friends book. Rob, to whom I think I gave it, speaks truely: "Seriously. Fucking. Good.")
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold (Someone at work enthused about this recently...)
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas (Why this and not Man in the Iron Mask? Who knows. Musketeers come later, I see.)
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac (I've had the same copy since high school. Someday...)
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville (Rough seas reading Melville, but this is the one to sail. I used to have a list somewhere of the chapters that are just whaling practice in detail but don't advance the plot and are thus safe to skim/skip.)
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens *** (Either this or Christmas Carol was the first Dickens I read, when I was a kid. At the time, I saw it as a cool adventure story for Oliver, and I wanted very much to be the Artful Dodger.)
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker (Definitely worth it if you've any affection for the whole muddled Dracula mythos. Surprisingly sophisticated, and very much a 19th Century novel. There's a good unabridged recording, with different readers for the different narrators.)
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce (I read it once, with help from a seminar/support group. The second time through hasn't gone as well...)
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - A.S. Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens ***
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte's Web – E.B. White *****
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (Does this mean everything? I haven’t read everything…)
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams ****
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole (I’ve been camping under that banner for several years now, but still haven’t read the book. At least I own a copy now…)
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute (no, but I read On the Beach...)
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare ***** (The Narnia Abberation repeats itself... But at least it let me express affection for this play in particular.)
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Snooping around after the source of that list, I came upon a few other similar lists on the web. There were some notable things absent from that big list but included on others:

My Ántonia - Willa Cather ***
Fahrenheit 451 - Ray Bradbury *** (If ‘t were me, I’d say Something Wicked This Way Comes, but taking the long view it should be this. Add The Martian Chronicles, too; it can slide right in where we take out The Five People You Meet In Heaven.)
The Age of Innocence - Edith Wharton *** (Pick another if you like – House of Mirth, maybe? Just not Ethan Frome.)
The Call of the Wild - Jack London (Or perhaps White Fang? London ought to be in there somewhere.)
The Pillars of the Earth - Ken Follett **** (For a while, this was my give-it-to-friends book. The kind of novel you inhabit.)
Treasure Island - Robert Louis Stevenson (Toss in Jekyll & Hyde, too, if there’s room.)
The Stand - Stephen King (Not my favorite of the King canon, but I guess it’s either this or The Shining. Any other King candidates?)
The Magus - John Fowles *** (I suppose it’s a little lame to point to a book that’s forty years old as a “modern novel,” but Fowles’ novel is so exemplary of what the form began to do in the latter half of the century. An ambitious work which almost consistently succeeds.)
Gormenghast - Mervyn Peake (I’ve known little about this – I’m assuming the list meant the entire trilogy – but have been curious for years. I finally found all three books at a used book store a year or so ago, only to find out shortly after that they’re back in print. Heaven alone knows when I’ll get ‘round to them.)

My own list addition:
The Princess Bride - William Goldman ***** (If I need to justify it, I’ll point to the wonderful narrator games Goldman plays. The funniest, most heartwarming meta-text you’ll ever read.)

How Not To Begin A Fantasy Film Franchise

2008-07-04T15:27:00.002-04:00

I just watched The Golden Compass. I'm sort of glad that I didn't see this in the theaters, as I'd intended to. It's a sumptuous film, visually, and seeing it on a big screen might have blunted my opinion of it. On the little 14" screen on which I watched it, none of that grandeur was able to impress, and there's little else in the film capable of making much of an impression in any venue of presentation.

I've read Pullman's Dark Materials trilogy (listened to, actually, in the very good unabridged readings), and Chris Weitz's film of this first book captures none of the magic in Pullman's writing. Yes, the film has a lot of rich visuals, but it fails to ever really create a genuine sense of place. Likewise with characters; Golden Compass is a journey story, and much of its fun is rooted in the characters Lyra meets, and sometimes allies with, along the way. Although usually well cast, those characters are given no chance to distinguish themselves in this largely expository film.

In one of the odder adaptation choices I've ever seen, Weitz opts to end his movie short of the end of the book. The effect is that the film sort of sputters quickly to a close without much closure, and screams "next installment in the works" as you're pondering whether you'd devote the time to that next installment.

Civilization

2008-07-01T20:11:00.002-04:00

Ice is civilization.

By association, it's logical to say that so too is air conditioning. Perhaps not civilization, but civilized.

I'm civilized again.

My credit card may be wishing I were a bit more primitive.

Caesar Months Suck

2008-07-01T13:30:00.003-04:00

July. August.

In the five-day forecast on both my desktop weather Widgets, none of the daily temperatures is below 80°F. Most are in the high 80s. Several tip 90°. Hell, even the nighttime lows are all above 65°; that's warmer than the highest I heat my home in the winter months.

Everyone has a right to their opinion. My opinion is this sucks.

I don't like hot weather. I don't do well in hot weather. When the temperature gets within 20° of my natural internal body temperature (which is around 97°), I begin to aestivate. To complicate things yet more, there's a point soon into the 80s when I can't get comfortable and can't sleep.

Why am I kvetching about this? Well, other than maintaining a long-standing tradition, I have an immediate motivation -- my air condition has died.

For the past couple of weeks, I've been able to keep at least part of the house below 80°. Right now, it's 82° outside and there's a 1° difference between that and and the thermometer on the bookshelf next to me. The sun hasn't hit this side of the house yet.

Even now, I can feel my wallet shift in my pocket as my credit card cringes, but there may not be an option.

It's that other nine percent...

2008-06-29T19:26:00.003-04:00

You are a 91% traditional Catholic!

Congratulations! You are more knowlegeable than most modern theologians! You have achieved mastery over the most important doctrines of the Catholic Faith! You should share your incredible understanding with others!

Do You Know Your Baltimore Catechism?
Make Your Own Quiz

"More knowlegeable [sic] than most modern theologians?" I doubt that. But more knowledgeable than most practicing Catholics? Quite likely.

Sometimes I think the problem is that I know too much...

"Jumbo Shrimp?"

2008-06-29T10:20:00.002-04:00

Last night Saturday Night Live aired what I think was George Carlin's first appearance on the show. Must've been -- I think it was from 1975.

God, he looked so young.

Some classic stuff, before it was classic. A couple of bits that fell flat, too, and he handled that as deftly as anyone I've ever seen (with the exception, of course, of Johnny Carson).

Plus, one of the musical guests was Janis Ian.

Be Kind

2008-06-24T10:57:00.004-04:00

Another great quote crossed my path last week. (Not, thankfully, Blake this time.) From Arthur "Attention must be paid" Miller:

Maybe all one can do is hope to end up with the right regrets.

I know that it appears rather pessimistic at first glance; Hell, anything with the word regret in it is likely to seem somehow pessimistic; read it again.

"The right regrets." That's what got me. Regrets, I believe, are inevitable. There's no way any sane self-aware person is going to get through this life without some regrets. I ought to have done this or I shouldn't have done that or I wish I had whatever. We make mistakes. We make poor choices. We have regrets. But what sort of regrets? That's what got me thinking.

And much of what I've thought about involved identifying the wrong regrets. I know that the choices I most regret are those that were, directly or indirectly, based in fears, or motivated by a desire to maintain comfort or some sense of security, or were, simply, taking the "safest" or easiest way out. That's the wrong sort of regret. If such a choice resulted in my not doing something I later wish I had done, then whatever regret I end up feeling over having chosen as I did is very much one of the wrong regrets.

More and more in the past few years I've found myself regretting an ever-increasing number of the choices I made since, well, somewhere around the end of high school. That feeling doesn't necessarily mean that they were the wrong choices, though. Regret isn't always a logical thing. We're talking about a Hell of a lot of choices here, and a lot of them may have been made for the right reasons. Almost consistently, the choices I regret most acutely are those that I now feel I made for the wrong reasons. Worse, I may have felt at the time that I was basing my choice on the wrong reasons, yet let those reasons be the priority in choosing. Those regrets are the wrong regrets.

And that, I think, is essentially the same thing that those William Blake quotes were saying to me. When you tally up all your regrets, those you'll most regret having will be from the things you never did. Maybe all one can do is hope -- try -- to end up with the right regrets. But, really, that's not so bad a goal to strive for.

p.s. -- The title for this post comes from a snatch of lyric I can't place: "be kind to my regrets." Anybody have any idea where that's from? I'm fairly sure it's a song lyric, but my brain won't recall where it's from. Anybody?

Yes!

2008-06-18T23:11:00.002-04:00

I finally found a quote that sums up most of my feelings about the whole "less is more" bullshit people who just don't get it tend to spout in defense of what they think of as a "minimalist" aesthetic.

Less is only more where more is no good.

-- Frank Lloyd Wright
(1869-1959)
American Architect

It doesn't surprise me at all that Wright got it; the fact is abundantly evident in his work. But what a great way of putting it.

Merciful Rain

2008-06-11T00:09:00.002-04:00

I'm just thanking God for the thunderstorm(s) tonight, which battered some of the heat out of the air. On my drive home, around 10:30, much of the asphalt in our parking lot and on the street was still lightly steaming.

Never needs to get above 78°F. Ever.

Genuinely Creepy

2008-06-01T17:00:00.005-04:00

I still may not be sure about the whole followed-by-Blake-quotes thing, but this Google listing, which I can across while looking for poetry search sites, is genuinely creepy:

Okay, so I'm pretty sure this is the result of the reckless use of a template of some sort. They seem to use more or less the same format for everything. It's the exclamation marks that get me.

But the funeral poem contest? That's just creepy.

Perhaps You Know His Poetry...?

2008-06-01T16:35:00.004-04:00

I'm still being followed by William Blake.

The show we just opened at work, I Have Before Me A Remarkable Document Given To Me By A Young Lady From Rwanda, has a Blake reference in it. It's unattributed -- just a throw-away, really. Actually, I may have been the one to spot it. "England's green & pleasant land," from Blake's "Jerusalem." (Funny thing was, I could recite the entire poem but wasn't certain of the title until I looked it up.)

But that isn't the real stalking bit.

Chaz, our stage manager for this show, has a fun habit of including a relevant quote on each performance's sign-in sheet. For last season's Huck Finn play, Splittin' the Raft, we got Twain quotes. For The Glass Menagerie, snippets of Tennessee Williams. It's a little tougher with this current show: the playwright doesn't have an extensive body of work, and daily descriptions of the Rwandan genocide would get quite wearing on top of the play itself. So, never one to miss a connection or pass up a good opportunity, Chaz took to using quotes from William Blake.

Within the first three performances of the show (I can't recall exactly which), this ended up on the sign-in sheet:

He who desires, but acts not, breeds pestilence.

I can't tell whether this is inspiring or just plain creepy.

Hunted or Haunted?

2008-05-15T00:56:00.003-04:00

I’ve been followed by two quotes in the past week. Yes, followed. It happens. If it’s a song, well, I won’t jump to calling it "following" unless there’ve been several unlikely recurrent encounters. And if the song is for one reason or another air-play likely – a recent release or big hit, say – then the whole idea of it following me is just dismissed out-of-hand. When I run across things as esoteric as these twice inside of the space of a few days, however, I can only conclude that I’m being followed.

One of them is a quote from William Blake and the other is in Latin, for pity’s sake.

First the Latin (although I think it was the initial appearance of the Blake that actually popped up first).

cras amet qui nunquam amavit; quique amavit, cras amet

I did a little online hunting, and found it identified as “the refrain from the 'Pervigilium Veneris', a poem which describes a three day holiday in the cult of Venus, located somewhere in Sicily, involving the whole town in religious festivities joined with a deep sense of nature and Venus as the "procreatrix", the life-giving force behind the natural world.”

The first pop-up came when I was unpacking a box from State College. (Well, it’s not really accurate to say “unpacking,” in as much as I don’t have anyplace to unpack this stuff to, if you see what I mean; I guess it’s actually more a matter of opening a box and going through the contents.) This was one of several boxes of books, musty but welcome. I cannot just look at books and move on. I need to look at the books, sometimes look through them. This made things a little mustier, as I thumbed pages. The box was all paperbacks, standard mass-market things, a mix of entertainment (a couple of Destroyer books – yea!) and literature (Isak Dinesen, F. Scott Fitzgerald) – decide for yourself where E.L. Doctorow falls.

Among them was John Fowles’ The Magus. Now, the odd thing is that the one line from this book that I’ve carried with me since I read it was not the quote that popped up and started following me. That would be the Latin. Nor was it the Blake, which was already on my tail and lying in wait for me here as well. That line I’d held onto, Fowles’ own, a commandment to replace the childish Old Testament Ten, is “Thou shalt not inflict unnecessary pain.” Even years distant and pulled from the context of the book, it sticks with me as a sort of truth in the imperative tense.

The Latin is a sort of a postscript to Fowles’ novel, two lines hovering unattributed below the last words of his prose. Unattributed, and untranslated.

cras amet qui nunquam amavit

quique amavit, cras amet

Below it on the page in my paperback is my own translation, probably done sans reference with my even-then rusty Latin:

Let he who has never loved, love
and he who loves will tomorrow love
(whoever)

Obviously, I was having some trouble with the tenses in that second bit.

A day or two later, the same thing showed up in the daily quotes e-mail I’d signed up for a couple of weeks earlier. I have to say I prefer my version of the first line, although it’s not specific about the “tomorrow” time frame, but their translation is certainly a good deal clearer about the second bit:

“May he love tomorrow who has never loved before; and may he who has loved, love tomorrow as well”

You must admit that the appearance of something like this twice in a few days’ time is pretty odd in its own right, never mind the ways its meanings might apply to my mood and life of late. Pretty damned odd. Wanna knock it up a notch? Grab your literary Spice Weasel and follow me…

Back on May 5, Terry Gross interviewed writer/publisher Charles Ardai, founder of the Hard Case Crime publishing group, on Fresh Air. I don’t think I heard the episode when it first broadcast; I think I heard it sometime the following weekend while driving out to work; that was when the Blake quote first appeared. How the Hell does William Blake get into an NPR interview about the preservation and revival of pulp crime novels? Good question. Ardai was a literature major in college, and was particularly drawn to the English Romantic poets as an undergraduate. (It is, not surprisingly, very easy for an individual of a certain slant to be greatly drawn to the Romantics as an undergraduate. I’ll willingly attest to that, as will the markings and marginalia in a certain section of my Norton Anthology Vol.II if I ever find it again.) The protagonist of the two novels Ardai has written himself is named after Blake; the books’ titles are taken from Blake; most of the chapters start with a quote from a Blake poem. One of the examples Terry Gross pointed to was this line from Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell:

“Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires.”

Flash forward a couple of days. I’m flipping through that paperback of The Magus, looking at passages I’d underlined years ago. Perhaps I was looking for that commandment. I can’t really say with certainty. But what do I come across? A passage that references our line from Blake. “Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires.” Underlined, by me, years ago. So I’m pretty definitely being followed by that line of Blake. How abso-fucking-lutely unlikely is it that something like that – Hell, that any Blake quote, never mind one that’s not among the most common – should show up in two such disparate places in the space of a few days? Seriously. But this? This line that slices cleanly through the meat and scrapes along the bone as though carving some accusatory scrimshaw in the pallor of my own ossified passions. This unflinching summary of the lost half of my life. This condemnation of all my unacted desires – not of my desires themselves, but of me in my having effectively repudiated them in never having acted on them. This line of Blake? What am I supposed to do with this?

More – elsewhere in that same paragraph, double-underlined by my hand:
“Despair is a disease.”

Don’t I know it.

The thing is, I have no way of knowing whether these two stalking quotes are working together or individually. I’d prefer to think they’re both agents of the same agency. Maybe they’re just doing the good-cop–bad-cop thing. I really can’t help looking for meaning, because this all speaks – screams – so loudly and emphatically to my soul at the present time. “Let he who has never loved, love…”

One last fragment to toe over as we wander these ruins, this one not stalking, nor stumbled upon, but sought after and found. Auden, way out of context, from “Anthem for St. Cecilia’s Day” -- Weep for the lives your wishes never led.

cras amet qui nunquam amavit

Zoom-zoom?

2008-05-13T20:16:00.002-04:00

Got the truck towed back to my neighborhood garage. They tell me the starter died. The part came in today, but not early enough to get the work done. So I won't have my truck back until tomorrow, and since I have a production meeting first thing in the morning that means I won't have the truck back until the end of the day tomorrow. Until then, I'm stuck driving the rental. Since I was initially stuck renting whatever Enterprise had available on the lot, I'm getting around in a mini-van. Can't shake the feeling that at any moment I'll be chased down by a bunch of kids expecting me to shuttle them to ballet class and soccer practice...

Aww, c'mon!

2008-05-11T23:53:00.002-04:00

If nothing else, you'd think the universe would occasionally cut me a break, if only to fuck with my mind a little.

But, no. If there's one thing I can rely on (and I've begun to think there really is only the one), it's the certainty that stuff will go wrong in my life at either a point when I might otherwise actually stand a chance of enjoying something or at a point when I can least afford to deal with the going wrong of the particular thing that goes wrong. Unless, of course, it's possible to meet both criteria at the same time.

I think we just scored on that last one again.

I've had a few long days doing tech for the Theatre School's Adult Ensemble one-acts. Tonight was the final performance, in which we took just one of the three one-acts to Kendal retirement community. Limited space, very limited time, severely limited tech. And a good time was had by all.

Until I tried to leave.

The truck had pulled this odd routine of not turning over once earlier this week, but then shrugged it off without apparent explanation and started fine throughout the rest of the week. Why not wait until it's 9:30 on a Sunday night and we're in a parking lot that's closer to Delaware than to my house before pulling the stunt again and this time sticking with it?

Yes, it could have been worse. But that glib truism hasn't been of any use as consolation for quite some time, ever since I came to understand that no matter how bad things are at any given moment they can always be worse.

So I'm now at home (special thanks to Sara for the lift!) and my truck is in the parking lot at Kendal. I'll deal with this when it's daylight.

just not fair....

2008-05-10T12:17:00.003-04:00

I've known the release date for a while now (Hell, I have a countdown widget on my iMac), but I only just put the date in context and realized that Indiana Jones and The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull will be opening while I'm in the middle of tech.

That's just not fair.

It's been a while since I went to see a movie after working a twelve-hour day, with another twelve-hour day ahead. Actually, I can't say that I've ever done that. But there's a first time for everything.

On firm foundations

2008-05-03T19:12:00.004-04:00

An example of why I always included something from King when I was teaching:

"Non-violence is the answer to the crucial political and moral questions of our time; the need for mankind to overcome oppression and violence without resorting to oppression and violence. Mankind must evolve for all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggression, and retaliation. The foundation of such a method is love."

Martin Luther King, Jr.

(1929-1968)

Patient Belongings

2008-05-02T21:58:00.003-04:00

I’m going to come back.

That was always the thought. I’m going to come back and get this stuff. Or, perhaps, I’m going to come back to this life. At this point, fifteen years distant from the thinking, I can’t with any certainty say exactly which was the thought. In truth, I’m not sure I knew which at the time, or even if I was thinking of the difference. There was just the thought – I’m going to come back.

And I did.

When I left State College in the Summer of ’92 to move back in with my parents and deal with the accumulating effects of my father’s strokes, I packed the contents of my apartment (hereafter referred to as “my stuff”) into a storage locker at Stowaway, Inc. and came here with some clothes and… well, I don’t really recall what else. I was going to deal with things head-on, as that seemed the only way to stop the constant barrage of blind-siding impacts as one thing or another demanded my attention. I was not going to get completely absorbed in this business. I wasn’t changing my destination; I was just pulling off onto a siding for a little while to avoid a head-on collision with the onrush of things with my parents; after all that had passed, I was going to roll back onto the tracks and continue on my way.

Yeah, right.

That’s not what happened. Never mind what I was or was not going to do. What did happen? Well, I didn’t collide; I didn’t pull off onto a siding, either; I derailed. Yeah – totally off-track, off the rails, rolling down the hillside to finally come to rest among the broken trees and tangled brush at the bottom, friction-polished wheels turned shining to the sky.

And I stayed. I was, of course, completely absorbed in this business. I dealt with what demanded to be dealt with. (Did it actually need to be dealt with? Further, did it need to be dealt with by me? Let’s turn that particular train of thought right back into the roundhouse. The whole concept of discerning – or even defining, much less meeting – these things called “needs” was always a very foggy one in my family. Let it suffice to say that there were demands, and I met them.) I dealt with my father’s health as it slid into a steeper decline. I dealt with his dying, and I dealt with burying him. I dealt with what would in retrospect reveal itself as the overture to my mother’s decade-long symphony of diminishing health and increasing demand. I dealt with my mother’s uncle’s death, and some off the massive mess he left behind. I dealt with my grandmother’s death, when it finally came after lingering at the door for half a dozen years. It’s tempting to say that I dealt with pretty much everything except my own needs; it’s tempting because it’s not entirely untrue. Oh, I dealt with doing what was necessary for me to survive during these years; I met the demands of my continued existence . I did not, however, do much, if anything, to actually answer my needs. Hell, I wasn’t listening to or evening acknowledging those needs – how could I possibly do anything about meeting them? I stayed, I did what demanded to be done, and it did not take long for those up-turned wheels to dull and seize with rust or for the swath of torn-up trees and bushes to fill in with new growth and vanish while the unused tracks above blurred beneath intruding grasses until there was no sign of where that wreckage at the foot of the hill might have come from nor the scar of its passing.

The only link other than memory to connect that overgrown wreckage with the rails above was the single baggage car, uncoupled before the rest went off the rails and left in storage back a ways along the line.

I know it’s just projection to imagine that after a while my stuff felt I’d abandoned it. Don’t know how I could see it any other way, though, given that I myself felt thoroughly abandoned by pretty much everything. Is it anything other than natural that the stuff in storage should end up saddled with a sort of totemic significance? Anything other than reclamation meant defeat. The thought remained: I’m going to come back. Foolish or not, that remained my sole intention.

I’m well aware – far too well aware – that at some point along the line this determination passed out of the lands of Reasonable, traveled all the way through the territories of Questionable and entered into the wilds of Ridiculous. I don’t need to actually do the math to concede that there’s every likelihood I’ve paid out more in rent for that storage locker over the years than the total cost of everything stored in it. That’s not what this is about. That was never what this was about.

There were times when I was asked to defend the consistency of my determination. Forgive me, but I still cannot see such a request as anything other than an insult. For all its faults, I’m grateful to this stubborn little hobgoblin for perching on my shoulder and affirming my doggedness.

Because I did come back.

This past Tuesday, 29 April, I came back with a rented U-Haul truck and emptied that storage locker. It was not the first time I’d opened the locker in that time: there’d been a small dipping attempt a few years back, when I’d retrieved some books, some CDs, my computer desk and some few other things, mostly whatever was right at hand and safe to transport in my pickup. But this was It: this was the clear-it-out, salt the earth and move on transition. When I pulled down the U-Haul truck door on this one and latched it with the padlock I’d taken off the storage locker, I was supposed to take my obdurate little hobgoblin and give him a true honest hug and perhaps a sorrowed kiss before grinding him under my heel and leaving him to the crows.

Let’s not mistake this for a cleanly joyful reunion, okay?

For one thing, I’m touching my stuff for the first time in fifteen years. Fifteen fucking years. That’s more than a third of my life. (And it feels like it's more than half.) Each thing I took out of that locker was heavy with regret, weighted by years of missed chances and lost opportunities. The dust that coated it all might just as well have been an early sprinkling of dirt on my grave. The thought had always been I’m going to come back. Now, the thought was It was never supposed to be this way.

I’m going to come back. Never was this thought more stabbingly clear than it was in the moment of stark terror when I pulled out a box labeled “Kitchen – Food.” I’m going to come back. That was the thought, remember? I wasn’t putting this stuff into storage. I was going to come back. Years. It was not supposed to be this way. Fifteen years. It was never supposed to be this way. Apart from some canned goods and a package of dried apricots that’s best not considered at length, this particular stab wasn’t as gruesome as it might’ve been. Pasta, some rice, a couple of packs of five-for-a-dollar Ramen Noodles and a few boxes Jiffy cornbread mix. Lots of tea bags. And – in a different box – some booze: maybe half a bottle of Bacardi 151, less than half in the Yukon Jack, an unopened (?!?) big 1.75 litre plastic bottle of Seagram’s 7 and two bottles of red wine, also unopened. (I’m curious about the wine; it’s a 1987 vintage; not ideal storage conditions, by far, but still…) There’s much – so much – yet to open, so I may well find more frightening things. None of this was put away with any thought that it would sit there the way it has. It was never supposed to be this way. I was going to come back.

Some write-offs have already gone out in this morning’s trash. There is a lot more to go through and a lot more to go out in the trash. The first floor of my house smells mighty damn musty and, frankly, looks like the inside of a storage locker. This is not a cleanly joyful reunion.

Still, this evening I listened to a particular CD for the first time since 1992. (Yes, I unpacked a box labeled CDs almost immediately. Yes, I know I’m pathetic.) I finally have the measurements of a piece of furniture I’m determined to have in my home. (Hell, I have the actual piece of furniture, albeit in pieces.) I have a glass bear bank containing several hundred pennies (all from 1992 or before). And somewhere in all this stuff should be a hat rack on which I used to hang my hat. (There’s some cool image in there, I’m certain, but I’m not quite up to teasing it out just now.) And at least as significantly, I don’t have anything in storage half-way across the state. For good or ill – and I am not at this moment wholly certain about assigning the proportions of either – one of the last concrete ties connecting me to those years of my life has been unknotted. I fought for years to keep it from being cut.

So now I’m left with two loose ends.

And enough rope to hang myself.

This Thing of Darkness

2008-04-26T17:14:00.003-04:00

Listen to NPR at your peril; it can get you thinking.

Generally, I consider that a virtue. Sometimes, though, it gets me thinking on things that I’m not necessarily all that comfortable thinking about. I’m not talking about topics like Darfur, which ought to make one uncomfortable. I’m talking about things that I’m not comfortable thinking about.

Like my depression.

Even the basic problem of language is frustratingly tricky, defining as it unavoidably does one’s relationship with the Thing. Do I have depression? Am I depressive? Or am I a depressive? Parts of speech aren’t happy making commitments here. Am I a person with Depression? Or just a depressed person? When I find myself referring to it as “my depression,” I feel a catch of inaccuracy snag somewhere in the language. It sounds too much like “my foot” or some such, implying a relationship that is certainly not the case. My foot is my foot; its presence does not define me. Although I suppose its absence would define me to a much greater extent. So in that respect the relationship is almost the direct reverse: the presence of my depression does define me.

Or, at least, at this point in my life it feels as though it does.

And here we get to the NPR bit. The topic on a recent Talk of the Nation was the physical and psychological effects of taking anti-depressants long-term. It’s a fact that none of these drugs, including SSRIs, have been in use – or existence – long enough for any sense of truly long-term physical effects to have presented itself. So when you’re talking about the prospect of being on a drug permanently you’re touching on a big unknown. The thing that caught me, though, was the psychological effects. One specific focus was people who’re prescribed anti-depressants in their teens and remain on the drugs through much or all of their adolescence. Is this chemically effecting their development as individuals in ways that extend beyond merely controlling the depression? And in a more general sense, how does a dependency on a drug like this effect your sense of self and define your identity?

This is a situation distinct from, and essentially different than, being on cholesterol or blood pressure control medication. At least I see it so. If I drop my cholesterol medication, my bad cholesterol will probably go up. But the way in which I view the world is not likely to change as a direct result. Every time I’ve gone off anti-depressants that exact change has been a consideration. Will dropping the drug nudge a return of the depression? In other words, will dropping the drug alter my perception of reality, effectively changing the world? Have I reached a point where the presence of the drug is the only thing preventing the constant and controlling presence of the depression?

In retrospect, it looks like I’ve been cycling through bouts of recurrent depression since at least my teens; I can’t be sure of identifying things before then. Back in the good old days, things moved faster – a full cycle could manifest and pass in a matter of weeks. Somewhere in, I think, my freshman year of college I began seeing this, and actually started thinking of things as a sort of growing outward spiral. As I moved around the circle I’d pass the same things again and again. At the time it didn’t occur to me that this could be a perspective of perception; I thought of it as a sort of cycling of life. The model holds up better than it has any right to, though. If a depression lasted, say, 12° around the circle twenty years ago, and still lasts for 12° today, we’re talking about a lot more line now than we were then. Each spiral outward needs a longer line to circumscribe all of the concentric circles within it. What took a few weeks when I was 15 would take months at 35.

And that’s pretty much exactly what’s happened. It didn’t take twenty years to become a problem, though. Only seven or so, then I hit a depressive trough that lasted long enough to have an impact. Before, I’d never been non-functional for so long a time that I couldn’t catch up once the depression broke. Then I got hit with a depression that kept me down for so long that once I got out from under it I was so far behind that there was no way I’d ever get caught up. And that was the first major change in my relationship to “my depression” and, I guess, the beginning of this problem of identity.

The NPR program had a few callers, talking about whether or not they felt that their “me” on anti-depressants was their “real me.” Having been on and off and on assorted anti-depressants since 1991, this has become a valid question for me. My answer is far from satisfactory, and makes me rather uncomfortable. Hell, it freaks me out.

No, I don’t feel the “me” on anti-depressants is the real me. I don’t feel like the “me” that’s utterly under the sway of the depression is the real me, either. So I find myself in the awkward position of depending on a treatment that forestalls the advance of the illness but does not restore me to my unafflicted state. I can’t help feeling that it’s a situation where the drug masks the symptoms but does nothing to eradicate the illness itself.

For that matter, a whole pile of the known potential side-effects of the drug are exactly the same as symptoms of the depression itself. The constant fatigue – unrelieved symptom of the depression or side effect of the medication? Who knows?

You see how this can be a problem. The matter is further complicated by the fact that the depression hits things that have been essential to my identity. It takes away things I enjoyed in as much as I don’t – can’t – find the enjoyment anymore. It impedes – or outright prevents – my reasoning and critical faculties from functioning as they ought, or at least as they otherwise did. It leaves me feeling disconnected from everything and everyone.

The drugs do not restore that feeling of connection; the drugs don’t clear away all the impediments to my thinking; they don’t bring back the missing enjoyment. What do the drugs do, then? They allow me to continue in this unsatisfactory condition. They allow me to function. They allow me to existent in a state of being that, frankly, has little intrinsic to justify itself. It’s like some sad echo of Civil War medicine – the leg wound is festering, so we cut off the leg to prevent it from spreading. Congratulations! You don’t have gangrene. You don’t have a leg, either, of course. But, hey, at least you don’t have gangrene.

It feels like the options are gangrene (and death) or hobbling around without a leg. Actually being what you were before the leg wound is simply not an option, not a possibility.

But this isn’t a wound, it’s not an infection. It’s me. If I’m at a point where being off medication means being in the grip of the depression, then I’m really not sure where to look for the “real me.” I feel like the real me is neither depressed nor medicated. I also feel like the real me hasn’t put in an appearance in quite some time. Between the depression and the drugs, I feel as distant and disconnected from that “real me” as I do from everything else, probably more so in some ways. It’s like a sort of experiential amnesia – I can remember doing a thing, and enjoying it, but I cannot recall what it felt like to enjoy.

So it’s like there were two real mes before the drugs. One was the me who actually enjoyed things. He’s more or less an historical figure at this point. The other was the me who could bear not enjoying things. Or perhaps just detach and compartmentalize and not feel the ache of absence and the presence of pain. Whatever it was, there was a me who could abide and endure, and whose existence did not conflict with or contradict the other’s.

Anymore, it feels like the real me is the Greg with the unendurable depression. That’s what’s real. So, yes, the real Greg is on drugs, because the real Greg maybe can’t function otherwise. But this isn’t either of the mes from before the drugs. This doesn’t feel like it’s the real me. Because at this point the depression isn’t an aspect, one characteristic among many; at this point, the depression is the characteristic; at this point, the depression is the defining characteristic, which has either overshadowed or eliminated all others.

I guess the difference is that I used to be able to accept the depression as a part of my life, because that was what it was. At some point, the proportions flipped. Now there’s no part of my life remaining that is not effected, definingly effected, by the depression. It’s no longer just a part of my life, and I am not able to accept that.

There’s a world of difference between “This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine,” and “This thing of darkness I acknowledge me.”

The sublime and the just plain sub

2008-04-25T20:27:00.002-04:00

Again, a post that's mostly passing on quotations.

First, from my friend Sam:

Sorrow can take care of itself, but to get the true benefit of joy, you must share it.

-- Mark Twain
(1835-1910)

Everyone knows how flinty and incisive Twain's humor could be. The big cuddly humanist heart that beat beneath the lapel of that creme coloured suit is less widely known.

Second, from the tall scary guy with the creepy big teeth:

Two step formula for handling stress:
1. Don't sweat the small stuff. 2. Remember that it's all small stuff.

-- Anthony Robbins
(1960~)

God, how I hate Tony Robbins...

Quote o' the Day

2008-04-18T17:52:00.002-04:00

I recently signed up at www.just-quotes.com to get a daily e-mail with -- what else? -- some quotations in it. It's long been a sort of innocent vice of mine that I enjoy finding quotes and sayings in rather random ways. (I used to love the boxes of Celestial Seasonings teas for this, until the formerly small private company got big, went corporate and lost its personality.) I call this a vice because I'm enough of a rhetorician that I cannot in good conscience avoid acknowledging the perils of quoting out of context; my real vice, then, is the fact that I hardly ever hunt down the original context for these things.*

Anyway, today's e-mail contained the following, which I particularly like. (And which, I think, holds little risk of great misrepresentation or misinterpretation when taken on its own.)

"Whenever a separation is made between liberty and justice, neither, in my opinion, is safe."

-- Edmund Burke
(1729-1797)

Irish Orator, Statesman

Oddly enough, one of my other frequently-visited quotation sites had this today:

You can only protect your liberties in this world by protecting the other man's freedom. You can only be free if I am free.

-- Clarence Darrow
(1857-1938)
American Lawyer

Both thoughts well worth remembering.

(*I am also guilty on rare occasions of knowingly taking a quote out of context, although this is usually only in the most casual of uses. The most acute exception is a snippet from Augustine with which I fell in love at first sight. It was, as I first saw it: "Love, and do what you will."
Of course it was inevitable that context was going to constrain it. What saddened me more deeply was the discovery that the out-of-context quote was also a sloppy -- or at least loose -- translation. The phrase is "Dilige et quod vis fac." The "love" referred to is not from amo -are [to love (passionately); fall in love with, be fond of] but rather dilige, from diligo -ligere [to choose out; to prize , love, esteem highly]. The distinction -- and this is coming from my extremely rusty undergrad Latin -- seems to steer the intention away from the romantic or passionate love with which I'd originally associated it. This ought not be surprising, given Augustine's post-conversion attitude towards the passions of his youth, but I was nonetheless disappointed. In my heart, yet restless though it most definitely is, I want it to be Ama et quod vis fac.)

And so it begins...

2008-04-16T23:53:00.000-04:00

It's taken me a few months to get rolling on any of what for lack of a better term I shall call my resolutions for the new year. Plans. Goals. Whatever.

My truck was in the shop for several days this past week, leaving me pretty much stranded. Stranded, and faced with a question of what to do around the house -- Read? Books? Comics? There are waiting piles of both. Watch some of those unwatched DVDs? (Marathoning Series 2 & 3 of Doctor Who in preparation for the start of Sci-Fi's broadcasting Series 4 this Friday did occur to me.) Do laundry?

Well, I did do a little laundry. I also cleared out all three closets on the first floor of the house. It's been more than a year, and I'm finally starting on the process of getting rid of my mom's things. This closet purge generated two big trash bags of clothes to go to Good Will, a pile of assorted stuff to go the to White Elephant sale at St. Francis, and at least six big trash bags of plain old trash to get, well, trashed. That's not counting the amount of stuff that went into the paper recycling -- I don't have a clear sense of that, since that bin was already filling up.

The trash went out on Monday night, along with the recycling, so that's gone. Now my next task is to get the Good Will and Elephant stuff out of the living room and off to its respective new homes, where those folk can, frankly, do with it what they will. None of it is among the things I feel that I actually need to find good homes for.

And the frustrating thing is that this didn't seem to make much of a dent in the volume of stuff that I need to deal with.

But it is, I suppose, a beginning.

My kingdom for a...

2008-04-15T22:55:00.002-04:00

My truck was in the shop from lunchtime Friday until late this afternoon. (Inspection turned into a bigger repair than I'd anticipated, but that's another story.) Being without my get-in-it-and-go transportation for a few days turned out to be a real splash-of-cold-water-to-the-face lesson in how utterly dependent I am on it.

It was also a reminder of how limited a selection of food I routinely keep in the house. I hardly ever eat all three meals at home, and often it's only breakfast. Good thing I like oatmeal.

Sure, I could have walked the few blocks to the trolley and gone grocery shopping at Trader Joe's in Media, right by the trolley tracks there. But then there's the prospect of toting the stuff back to the house from the trolley stop, uphill all the way. And we had such "nice" warm weather for part of the weekend. (<-- Note sarcasm, referencing the fact that once it gets much over 70° I consider it hot.) Maybe if I'd had once of those little collapsible carts...

Anyway, the dependence on the truck is even more sobering when I consider that a recent story predicted gasoline prices over the summer spiking past $4 a gallon in sections of the country.

Perhaps I ought to look into getting one of those little collapsible grocery carts...

Enable much?

2008-04-11T14:42:00.005-04:00

When I updated my mood on Facebook from "tired" to "lonely," I'd no idea it would result in exactly this showing up on my Facebook page:

Uhhh... "Send him a drink to cheer him up?" Qua?

Surely this isn't an entirely healthy suggestion in all cases.

Ah, what the Hell? I oughtn't take things so seriously. It's just Facebook, after all. I'm going to go chill out and knock back some Fekin Irish Whisky.

Damn right

2008-04-05T02:07:00.003-04:00

"April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead earth, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain."

-- T.S. Eliot
The Waste Land

Does This Make Me a Bad Person?

2008-04-02T20:47:00.002-04:00

Perhaps it's the fact that picking up one child and using it as a weapon against the others would be one of the first tactics to occur to me. Maybe that's what got me such a high score...

Laugh, damn you!

2008-03-25T19:40:00.002-04:00

Found this Evelyn Waugh insight:

“We cherish our friends not for their ability to amuse us,

but for ours to amuse them.”

Wow. So true.

Dirty Rabbits & Creepy Gnomes

2008-03-24T11:49:00.005-04:00

Lots of transitions.

Well, Glass Menagerie has closed. The rig will sit there for a week while we finish things next door on Getting Near to Baby, but next week it all comes down. Theatre: the ephemeral art.

Overall, a pretty good experience for me. I hope I can get Dennis Parichy, who's designing Baby, to chat with me about it a bit next week, if tech and previews are nicely lazy for us.

The aforementioned Baby opens on Friday, so we've a week of previews and final tech rehearsals ahead. The show features a bunch of these garden gnomes. When you spend too much time around these, they begin to get to you.

Lastly, this popped up on my Facebook:

Sure, it's just spam. And it's trying to tie in with the elusive Easter Bunny. And maybe it's just my own filthy mind. But...
The whole "Dangle Your Own Carrot" thing calls up some naughty ideas.

2008-03-20T15:33:00.005-04:00

Around two weeks back I made a comment on Rob's Blog.
Turned out to be prescient. Thus:

Damn, I laughed when I read that.

I'm not sure, but this may well be my favorite moment in Countdown.

She's Donna Troy, bitch.
Donna. Troy.

Bureau of Missing Gregs

2008-03-18T19:30:00.001-04:00

I'm in tech this week.

'Nuf said.

Carrying a Torchwood

2008-03-05T15:23:00.002-05:00

Last night I watched the final episode of the first series of the BBC's Torchwood. It's more or less a spin-off of the new series of Doctor Who. Add a little X-Files, pour into a classic team-show structure, stir and season to taste.

It doesn't ever function on the mythic level that the new Doctor Who sometimes reaches, but Torchwood certainly found its stride quickly. Considering that a full series on the BBC usually consists of 13 episodes, one had best find one's footing rather immediately.

The DVDs for Series 1 are on Netflix. Worth a look.

Spring?

2008-03-05T12:38:00.002-05:00

Yesterday the temperature outside was warmer than the heat setting at which I keep the house thermostat. Only be a few degrees, mind. But still.

Of course, I keep the house at 62° in the winter months.

Aunt Flo?

2008-02-21T13:44:00.001-05:00

Wow.
Almost a month between posts again.
Of course, it was a busy month...

Bonnie Tyler, eat yer heart out

2008-02-20T22:02:00.003-05:00

So I just got home from work and discovered we're having a lunar eclipse. The things you miss out on when you don't listen to NPR on your way to work in the morning.

When I was leaving work, the moon looked a little funky. Full, but not quite right. Of course, it had just stopped snowing a little bit before, so I figured it was lingering clouds.

Stopped and got a mini-pizza to take home for dinner. I checked out the sky again when I got out of the truck, and then stood in the driveway for a moment while things caught up with me. The moon was seriously funky now.

So I checked the internet and, sho' 'nuf, we're having the last total eclipse of the moon until 2010. Cool. Good thing I look at the night sky all the time.

Gonna go eat some pizza, then check out the eclipse again. Yum.

Say what you will...

2008-01-21T14:06:00.000-05:00

Mock me. Loathe me. Whatever.

29°F beats the hell out of 92°F any day in my book.

"Well said, my young apprentice..."

Dyslexics Untie!

2008-01-17T14:04:00.000-05:00

Okay, so I finally relented and stuck a toe in the waters of both FaceBook and MySpace. That's not what this post is about.

On one of these sites, though, I saw the following banner ad:

It was probably because I caught it out of the corner of my eye, but I pulled a classic dyslexic flip and immediately pictured a farm full of undead cattle mooing for more brains.

This in turn made me think of a movie to add to my Netflix que.

Welcome in Another Year...

2008-01-01T23:15:00.000-05:00

... and let the old one burn.

"It was the year of fire...
the year of destruction...
the year we took back what was ours.
It was the year of rebirth...
the year of great sadness...
the year of pain...
and the year of joy.
It was a new age.
It was the end of history.
It was the year everything changed."

Babylon 5 was referring to the year 2261, the fourth year of the series. The overall title for Season Four was "No Surrender, No Retreat." That about sums it up. Hello, 2008.

Promise Keepers

2007-12-30T21:44:00.000-05:00

Let it not be said that Rob bailed on a promise.

If you want it done right...

2007-12-27T16:04:00.001-05:00

Well, since Rob went with a more adventurous choice for yuletide Monkey Tuesday, after all but promising me a monkey wearing a Santa hat, I'm taking matters into my own hands.

It's a little late, but...

There was a close second:

But given that it's after the fact, I think the tired monkey better fits the days following Christmas.

Apple's Free Christmas Gift

2007-12-18T14:22:00.000-05:00

What's cuter than the actual I'm-a-Mac guy (Justin Long)?

This.

If I lived in a Rankin/Bass holiday special...

Holy .....!

2007-12-15T22:36:00.000-05:00

Zoinks! It's a week 'til Christmas! Functionally, taking into account that it's after 10:30 at night as I write this, and that stuff like Christmas cards actually can't wait until the day before, it's pretty much a week. A week! How'd that happen?

I mean, I began December thinking I was more or less on top of things. Then the three-week time vortex sucked me in.

At least I still have some comp time and daylight flex time remaining at work. Getting sick over Thanksgiving weekend seems to have muddled by timeline more than I'd expected.

The holidays just get more stressful every year...

Happy Birthday, Emily

2007-12-10T01:17:00.000-05:00

AFTER great pain, a formal feeling comes--
The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs--
The stiff Heart questions was it He, that bore,
And Yesterday, or Centuries before?

The Feet, mechanical, go round--
Of Ground, or Air, or Ought--
A Wooden way
Regardless grown,
A Quartz contentment, like a stone--

This is the Hour of Lead--
Remembered, if outlived,
As Freezing persons recollect the Snow--
First--Chill--then Stupor--then the letting go--

Emily Dickinson
born on this day in 1830

Imagine

2007-12-08T17:46:00.000-05:00

Twenty-seven years ago.

Before the World Trade Center attacks, before either Space Shuttle accident, the first I-remember-where-and-when moment for me was when I heard John Lennon had been shot.
Twenty-seven years ago.

Remember.

Imagine

Where's Snow Miser?

2007-11-22T13:16:00.000-05:00

Thanksgiving Day, 2007. And the Weather Bug widget on my iBook says it's 69° F outside.

WTF?

My thermostat for the house is only set to 64°. And that's supposed to be for heating. This is November, for chrissakes.

So I'm wondering what's going on with Heat Miser and Snow Miser these days. Which has me thinking about my long-discussed live action version of the classic holiday special, The Year Without a Santa Claus. Not that I really believe there needs to be such a thing. I just liked the idea of casting Heat Miser and Snow Miser.

I confess that my favorite pairing is a bit esoteric. An on-screen reunion of Wallace Shawn and André Gregory:

Pleasing to the cognoscenti, no doubt, but but perhaps not as appealing to a wider audience. With that in mind, I think Danny Devito is a viable option, and I must concede that James Woods is probably a stronger choice overall.

Hell, yeah. Woods is a perfect match. It's the role he was born to play.

André Gregory does have the nose, though...

Nevermind

2007-10-20T13:12:00.000-04:00

Ignore previous post.
Still want to quit.

Better

2007-10-19T11:19:00.000-04:00

The direction the needle points seems to be determined by the proximity of what I'm now thinking of as The Evil Magnet. When The Evil Magnet gets too close, it pulls the needle the wrong way. When it's at a distance, the needle can swing true and actually provide useful direction.

When the needle starts spinning weird, just close your eyes, pay it no attention, and try to remember where it was pointing before it was interfered with.

And wait for The Evil Magnet to go away.

180

2007-10-18T00:53:00.000-04:00

So, someone wanna talk me out of quitting my fucking job?
Anyone?

Back onstage again

2007-10-11T01:41:00.001-04:00

Well, not quite on.

The past few weeks at work have been fuller than the weeks directly before opening a show usually are for me. For one thing, I don't usually need to make time to attend rehearsals. Of course, I don't usually stick my head out of the booth and talk during performances, either.

If you know anything about Luigi Pirandello's play, it will come as no surprise that much about this production is odd. The basics: The members of an acting company are beginning their first day of rehearsals for a play when the titular six characters show up and insist that the actors perform their play instead. It seems their author abandoned the play he was writing -- the play about them -- and now they want someone else to take it up and continue their story.

What follows is a rollercoaster of melodrama, broad comedy and mind-twisting challenges to our comfortable concepts of artifice and identity. A simple play-within-play this puppy ain't. And while Lou Lippa's new translation/adaptation is playing around with its own theatrical artifices, it has a few technical gags thrown in for fun. That's where I come in.

Lou had written a character he named "Harry Andrews" as the guy up in the theatre's light booth. Oddly, he's one of the few characters in the play to have an actual name; most are "The Father" or "The Director" or "The Young Actor" -- you get the idea. In Lou's original script, Mr. Andrews is described as "a voice from the booth." Given the intimacy of the Steinbright Stage (179 seats, I think) director Ken Marini wanted an actual person rather than a recorded voiceover (which, I gather, is what some of the administrative folks took as a given when they read the words "a voice"). I'm still not quite certain what started this ball rolling, but I was asked if I'd be interested in doing this part with a few lines.

Hell, yeah.

Then I began to find out about some of what Kenny wanted to do with the play. He and Lou have worked together for something around thirty years at this point, so there's a real dynamic of collaboration going on. Example: Ken wanted the members of "The Acting Company" -- the actors playing actors within the show -- to all use their real names. So when Peter De Laurier, playing The Director, gives instructions to Mark Del Guzzo, who's playing The Young Actor, it sounds something like this:

"So, Mark..."
"Yes, Peter?"
"... you enter up left after her line."

Naturally, Kenny wanted me to be "me" as well. So things are getting seriously metatheatrical at this point. We're having the theatre's master electrician playing the tech guy? Talk about self-referential. Man, I eat this stuff up.

We had our first preview tonight. I'm happy (i.e. relieved) to say the play works for audiences. Seemed like a good time was had by all. I ought to have been in bed asleep two hours ago. I'm a little wired. Sure, around half my lines are "Yes, sir," or variations thereof. It's still acting of some sort. It's energizing; it's comfortable; it feels good.

Ahoy, ye scurvy dogs.

2007-09-18T22:38:00.000-04:00

Okay, so I haven't posted anything in a while. Things've been hectic since I got back from Fest.

But I promised myself last year that I would not let this go by unmentioned again. So here's your reminder:

September 19th is International Talk Like a Pirate Day. So talk like pirates, damn ye!

Arrrr.

Mud, Sweat & Beers

2007-08-14T12:26:00.000-04:00

There may be mud (we hope not too much);
there's already been sweat, and there's certainly more to come;
beer is pretty much a given.

I'm off to the Philly Folk Fest.

I'll probably surface again around this time next week.