If you have a .edu email,

http://www.amazon.com/gp/student/signup/info

One year of Amazon Prime free: free 2-day shipping, and 1-day shipping for only 3.99 on eligible purchases. This is probably going to lead to a bunch of targeted marketing emails, but you can always delete them.

when the mental thesaurus starts suggesting you replace words with more complicated words. Such as "obviates."

Jousters like Andrews use bigger horses than their medieval counterparts because they themselves are so much bigger than the knights of old. Their mounts are 2,000-pound draft horses — Percherons, Clydesdales and Belgians. If you add the weight of horse, rider, saddle and armor, you end up with something like 2,500 pounds at either end of the list moving toward each other at about 25 miles per hour. Roy Cox, a pioneer of American jousting, calculates the force of the resulting impact as 50,000 pounds per square inch. ‘If you want to experience that for yourself,” he says, “put your thumb down on the cement, take a sledgehammer and slam it really hard.’

NYT, “Is Jousting The Next Extreme Sport?”

the students from the chorus workshop I taught in LA had a public showcase.

I wasn’t there; I was back in Baltimore, and I was nervous on their behalf. It’s strange to have something you’ve worked on as closely as theater going up without your presence, and on the other side of the country. I’ve had this experience before, although I was always in the same city when the performance was happening. From the opposite coast, I really had to come to terms with there being nothing I could do.

But it went very well; I’ve heard back from D, who was there playing piano for them, and he says they remembered what we had created and did a great job.

I’m especially pleased because this end-of-workshop presentation of choruses felt like the most advanced of any I’ve put together from a student workshop. Also, the students arrived at all the final choruses in their own improvisations. So it really was their own work they were sharing, not mine. (That may be–probably is–why they didn’t have any trouble remembering it.)

Q. A few weeks ago the Vatican finally gave its approval to the Beatles. How did you feel about that?

A. It didn’t affect me in any way, but I do believe that the Vatican have better things to deal with than forgiving the Beatles. I don’t remember what it actually said — it had some weird piece in it, too. That they’ve forgiven us for being, what, satanic? Whoever wrote it was thinking about the Stones.

– Mr. Starr, interviewed in the NYT

Invitation to improvised chorus workshop / recording session: Rime of the Ancient Mariner (RSVP)

When: Saturday, July 3rd, from 2-4 PM in the afternoon.
Who: Actors & musicians (bring your instruments)
Where: In Los Angeles, near Sunset and Gardner (RSVP for address and parking info)
What: Recording session, incorporating improvisation

As you probably all know by now, my name’s Dara, (I used to direct in LA in 2006-2007, including at NOTE and the Met) and these days, I direct a Baltimore-based group of actors and musicians called The Parallel Octave (http://paralleloctave.wordpress.com). We work on choruses — poems read and sung by multiple voices, and performed to improvised music. I would like to try to have a parallel Parallel Octave session in Los Angeles.

We will spend some time discussing the text, experimenting with techniques, and then make an improvised recording of a small part of the text. ***Please note: you must be comfortable with having this session recorded and the results shared online in order to attend.***

Nothing about what we do is set: not the order or number of voices or the style of music. Depending on the group of artists who comes together for each session, the result is different. You can hear some of those results at http://paralleloctave.wordpress.com.

RSVP (daraweinberg A T gmail) for more information.

A novel is something you can live inside, like a house. It has lots of rooms that serve different purposes. You build it with your own two hands, and although it’s never perfect, and things are always breaking or need fixing, the dimensions are such that you can pass years of your life there. You can feel at home in it. You eat, you sleep, you have sex, you open your mail. A poem, I suppose, is more like a room. The word stanza actually means "room" in Italian. If you work hard enough on arranging the furniture, you might actually be able to make that room perfect. I think there’s the possibility for perfection in a poem that I’m not sure there is with a novel. But as lovely as that room might be, with just the right light and view, eventually you have to leave it. You get hungry or tired, or you have to go to the bathroom. And in the end, as you walk out, you realize you’ve closed that door behind you forever. Heraclitus said you can’t step into the same river twice. Well, when a poem or a novel is finished, you can’t ever go back in the same way. It’s just that a novel you live in for longer. And I like that. Wandering around in that house and making a life there.

– Nicole Krauss, in an old interview

“Like his contemporaries in land art Andy Goldsworthy and Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Polissky takes photos of his wprks before they melt or are blown away, then sells them in galleries. But unlike those artists, he and his team build the pieces without detailed drawings or plans. “Materials usually suggest the form,” he says.”

– from Nicolay Polissky’s web site, from a Readymade article.
I came across him this morning because of this NYT article. (Via.) Lots of pictures. They’re extraordinary. Fields of snowmen, towers of wood…He has a piece called "The Large Hadron Collider."

“Feeling a touch more provincial lately? You should. With the cancellation of UCLA Live’s International Theatre Festival, Los Angeles’ status as a cultural world capital has suffered a serious blow. The fall program that brought cutting-edge theater from across the globe to the Westwood campus has been officially put on ice.

It’s a depressing though not unexpected development. In May, UCLA Live executive and artistic director David Sefton resigned in response to the cost-savings edicts coming down from above that put a big scary “X” on the theater program he began in 2002 and curated throughout with a connoisseur’s fearlessness.

The words “rethinking and restructuring” — those rhetorical piranhas infesting our recessionary waters — circled ominously. It doesn’t take a psychic to tell you that a limb is about to be torn off.”

– Charles McNulty, L.A. Times