poetry

My Uncle Travelin’ Sonnet

This sonnet, 109, seems very appropriate to me for someone who’s on the road a lot. From Shakespeare Sonnet-A-Day.

CIX.

O, never say that I was false of heart,
Though absence seem’d my flame to qualify.
As easy might I from myself depart
As from my soul, which in thy breast doth lie:
That is my home of love: if I have ranged,
Like him that travels I return again,
Just to the time, not with the time exchanged,
So that myself bring water for my stain.
Never believe, though in my nature reign’d
All frailties that besiege all kinds of blood,
That it could so preposterously be stain’d,
To leave for nothing all thy sum of good;
For nothing this wide universe I call,
Save thou, my rose; in it thou art my all.

I find myself reassured by Shakespeare using the same rhyme-word twice in different forms – stain and stain’d. It seems fine. In fact, it seems done on purpose.

I was thinking I would like to make a poetry mix of sort for people at some point, but I wish there was a better way to do it. I could xerox them by hand, or email them as an attachment or as text, but I really wish there was a way to have poems on your IPod. Maybe it has to do with getting actors to read them out loud, recording them. But then I also wish that you could simultaneously see the lyrics on the screen as you listened.

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acting, criticism, writing

“Acting — good, bad and indifferent — can lead you down some strange and regrettable byways of opinion.”

Charles McNulty writes for the LA Times about whether the merit of a performance is found in its acting or its script, particularly in reference to the Ahmanson-based productions of DOUBT and HISTORY BOYS.

“Separating the player from the play, to paraphrase Yeats, is never easy. And critics themselves aren’t always adept at distinguishing where fault and virtue lie. An ambitious drama given an uneven premiere is flicked away like a piece of lint while a mesmerizing performance in a silly trifle can translate, as it did for Douglas Carter Beane’s giggly 2006 comedy “The Little Dog Laughed,” into not just raves but a Tony nomination for best play.”

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music

8 Quickies And 1 Fantasia – A Mellow/Weird Cast Holiday Mix

So, one night in my past I was driving around LA, sick of KROQ and Indie and even sick of NPR and I put on the classical station and heard this crazy piece of music, “Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis,” and it was the most incredible thing I’d ever heard, and I went to Amoeba and bought it right then and there, even before going home, and I didn’t know exactly how to put it on a mix tape, but hopefully starting out with eight short songs is the way to do it.

So I sorted my playlist by length and picked short weird stuff that I thought would somehow prepare the way for the Greatest Fantasia Ever. This is far and away the most mellow mix I’ve ever made. The fantasia made me do it. Gave it to the departing cast for their plane journeys.

The whole thing runs only about half an hour.

1. don’t know what this is. Someone gave it to me. (1.31)
2. intro -manau (1.41)
3.de la mata (anon.) – terra nova consort (1.14)
4. entre o rio e a razao – mariza ( 1.58)
5. territory – amy raasch (1.23)
6. hold on – dashboard confessional (2.13)
7. tomorrow – sean lennon (2.05)
8. a widow’s toast – neko case (1.37)
9. fantasia on a theme by thomas tallis – neville marriner, academy of st-martin-in-the-fields.( 14.19)

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L'Internet

The Institute for Distributed Creativity

I just got an email inviting me to join the mailing list for the Institute for Distributed Creativity. The archives are here, and anyone can subscribe at this link.

We would like you on board because we believe that you would be a great addition to the wide range of new-media theorist practitioners, artists, urbanists, scientists, designers, educators, and activists currently on this list. Founded in 2004, the Institute for Distributed Creativity and its mailing list are an experiment. This list strives for concentrated debate on the shifting paradigms surrounding the Social Web. Our collaborative research works to integrate expert culture with public debate. When you post to the iDC list about 1600 subscribers will find your post in their inbox.

The landscape of list culture offers much-appreciated announcement lists that are completely unmoderated.
Trebor Scholz, however, moderates this list. It established a consistently high quality of posts where announcements or anonymous posts will not be published. Super brief posts as well as multiple; simultaneous posts by one author are discouraged. If you would like to share URLs with the list, please add a few sentences contextualizing the website.

Trebor is the co-author of the forthcoming The Art Of Free Cooperation.

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theaterblog

“56. All that I write is practice, even when it is deepest in theory.”

I just discovered a new theater blog – not new, but new to me – Superfluities Redux. George Hunka isn’t posting for the holidays, but until he is, his manifesto, 95 Sentences About Theatre, is provocative reading.

4. The tragic holds a place for a laughter that recognises the wonders of ecstasy and surprise.
5. The comic mode can’t contain, however, the wounded scream.

He also writes a Guardian theater blog. It seems pretty new, but he’s already writing interesting stuff about the difference between England and America in theater – critics, playwrights, productions, why the US doesn’t have a national theater, etc.

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Lydia

Lydia rehearsal, Week 2, Day 6

We finished our second pass through Act 1, ran Act 1, and went out to dinner at the Ninth Door to celebrate. Many of the actors are leaving town for the holidays. We resume rehearsal on the 26th at 4 pm. Till then, I am, as one of my favorite people says, off like a prom dress.

Talking at dinner about the relationship, if any, between comic books and theater, and the work at Vampire Cowboys in New York at synthesizing the two. VC is a theater company with a heavy emphasis on camp, genre, and fight choreography, and looking at their website makes me want to run to New York.

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Lydia, the audience

Lydia rehearsal, Week 2, Day 5

We continued our second pass through the play and are in good shape to have a run of Act 1 at the end of the day tomorrow, before everyone leaves for the holidays.

The director’s exercise this day had to do with walks and how you find them. She had the actors walk in a circle and asked them to walk on different parts of their feet:
– the outside
-the inside
-the ball first
– the heel first

then revert to neutral, but walk with different parts of the face leading it:
-chin
-forehead
-nose

all in the aim of finding different possibilities for character walks.

As usual with this kind of isolation work, I find the differences between the possibilities so illuminating, and so full of content.

I remember the day in the MOH&H workshops when Dave and Michele and others decided we needed to try to do improvs without narrative at all – pure abstract improvs – and we couldn’t, because the audience kept supplying content. Then we started talking about “the abstract-narrative continuum.” That’s what I think of with exercises like this. No matter how purely technical the motivation, like a voice outside saying, “Walk on the heel of your foot,” the watching eye and brain will always supply some kind of story behind it. That’s the gift of the audience.

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directing, film

The Golden Compass movie

is greatly condensed from the book: but it has one great shot of the hull of a boat going through water, from the point of view of the hull, with the water slapping at it.

I would like to be able to do that theatrically. To shift point of view to the eyes of an object, especially a moving object. It must be possible. Not just through language – to speak in the object’s voice – but also through some kind of movement arrangement.

I have been wanting to make a short film with chairs as the only characters for quite some time now – anthropomorphized stop-motion chairs. I think chairs are such social creatures. And they really like each other. It would be a love story gone wrong.

Lately, and more lazily, I was thinking it wouldn’t be stop motion at all, but would be more Muppetesque – humans manipulating the chairs like puppets. (My daemon is a folding chair.)

But this makes me think about a different film, from the point of view of the chairs. Now that would be a very sad movie.

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L'Internet, theater, Uncategorized

The Shakespeare In Performance database

is “a searchable database of performance materials from over 1000 film and stage productions related to Shakespeare’s works,” and I’m listed on it, as the AD for Romeo and Juliet this summer at OSF. It’s still pretty new. If I search for the director of R&J, for example, it lists that but not his production of Two Gents the year before. Still, a cool idea.

Like IBDB or IMDB.
Now if someone would just make an Internet theater searchable database – for all productions, historical and present – it’s so silly that IBDB is only Broadway – so I could search for Moliere, for example, and see all the productions he acted in as well as those he wrote…It would have to be a wiki, so the scholars could edit it back and forth at each other. And as long as they’re granting my wishes, maybe it could also include future productions, so I could know what my next show was going to be.

I bet that would be something that would take off. If some programmingly inclined person wants to help me and Amina hack a basic version of it onto Upstage, we might be able to get something started. Eh?

I made two wikis for the DCTC production I’m on now, by the way – both private, for production use only. It’s a very useful theater tool. I should write a post about how to make a wiki, but it’s so easy it seems silly. You just do what pbwiki.com tells you.

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