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I was supposed to be at 3800 Elizabeth rehearsal today as stage manager, but had to call and beg off at around 10.30 am, feeling a little guilty as I wasn't quite so bad at that point. By an hour later, no guilt about it, I'm really sick.
And, unfortunately, I am going to have to go in tonight to Tribeca to help out with the Cat's Cradle box office as promised, mainly because I'm hoping to have a chance to audition someone from that company for Ambersons before the show. I don't know if I'll be staying for the show as I'd hoped, though. Tomorrow I have rehearsal and performance of 3800 in the afternoon and evening, and if I can't audition that person tonight, I'll have to do it at The Brick at 10.30 am tomorrow morning. I'll need rest.
I keep falling asleep for little unexpected naps and having unpleasantly specific dreams about having car accidents (swerving to avoid hitting a dog at Ditmas and Ocean Parkway and heading for the trees; taking a turn on the BQE a little too fast and sideswiping into the crash resisters at the southbound construction point where the road is temporarily forked; etc.) - and I always wake up right at the decisive point where I will either definitely have the accident or might just possibly avoid it, which leaves a horrible feeling of unfinishedness in my waking self.
And of course I'll be driving into Manhattan later tonight as the F Train is screwed up this weekend. Nice.
Last night we finished the shoot on Daniel's video with the one-shots of me in the kitchen scene. Pretty quick, pretty simple. I got to see the rushes of the slasher movie footage we shot on Wednesday, and it looked even better than I expected. Hysterical. Daniel sent me some frame captures from the footage we shot Thursday, in the basement and on the stoop - in the last post you got to see what the lighting actually looked like on the set, so here's what it looked like in the camera:
That's me as the slasher film director with my crew.
And there I am, freezing, on the stoop outside (hiding a knife behind my back, being paranoid).
This has to be done for a contest by early next week, so hopefully it will be somewhere online soon enough for me to point you to.
The book I'm reading that keeps sending me to sleep (not a reflection on the book, but on the difficulty of reading right now) is This Is Orson Welles, his interviews with Peter Bogdanovich from the 60s-70s. I often remember this as more of a collection of Welles' tall tales and fabulisms than it is (don't get me wrong, Welles' stories are often better than the truth, but they get tired once you've read them a dozen times). There's a lot of gold in Welles' observations. Two passages stood out to me this time, regarding current or recent concerns of mine - this first, recorded in a restaurant in Rome in 1969:
PETER BOGDANOVICH: You've been quoted as saying the theatre is on its last legs--
ORSON WELLES: Sure . . .
PB: --but that it's always been dying.
OW: Everybody's said that, ever since the Greeks. The Fabulous Invalid, that was what Kaufman and Hart called the theatre. They wrote a play with that title, and one of the characters was based on me, I'm proud to say . . . for the record, I hope I didn't seem to be saying that the theatre is finished. Great artists continue to perform in it, but it's no longer hooked up to the main powerhouse. Theatre persists as one of those divine anachronisms -- like grand opera (which I much prefer) and classical ballet (which I don't really dig at all). A performing art, more than a creative one, a source of joy and wonder, but not a thing of now.
PB: The "thing of now," of course, being film?
OW: Number One. And then there's television, still largely undiscovered territory . . .
PB: How about radio?
OW: An abandoned mine.
PB: That means radio has become another anachronism?
OW: Sure, like silent movies -- a victim of technological restlessness. Radio still functions in a way, of course; but the silents are wiped out. That's like giving up all watercolors because somebody invented oil paint. And black-and-white is going the same silly route. For me, radio's a personal loss, I miss it very much . . .
I am a bit wistful for the time (which I still remember the tail end of) when film was "the thing of now."
This next bit (recorded in Hollywood, late 1970s) must have stuck in my mind in conceiving Ian W. Hill's Hamlet:
PB: You said [Shakespeare] wasn't interested in the bourgeoisie.
OW: That was an age, you see, where there was lots of room at the top. In his plays, the common folk are mainly clowns.
PB: You'd say he was a snob.
OW: He was a country boy, the son of a butcher, who'd made it into court. He spent years getting himself a coat of arms. He wrote mostly about kings. We can't have a great Shakespearian theatre in America anymore, because it's impossible for today's American actors to comprehend what Shakespeare meant by "king." They think a king is just a gentleman who finds himself wearing a crown and sitting on a throne.
I was also going to post a couple of videos of Marianne Faithfull at different points of her career, but I need something more cheerful, so here are three videos to laugh at, laugh with, and get all touched by.
First (h/t James Urbaniak), a modern ad for the Ukrainian Army, which proves that in any language, the selling point for the Armed Forces will often be "Join Up and GET LAID!":
And here (h/t Bryan Enk), is the trailer for that classic film, A Belly Full of Anger:
And this one (h/t Shakesville) that just pulls out every bit of kitty-love in me -- two London zookeepers who raised a lion cub to adulthood, then had it returned to the wild in Africa, go to visit their former cub in his new home. Watch the look on the lion's face as it recognizes them - and then reacts. This clip is silent, and would seem to be at least 20 years old because there appears to be a short appearance by George Adamson of Born Free fame, who was killed by poachers in 1989 -- ah, some more Google and Wikipedia work shows that a whole film was made about Adamson and this lion, Christian, in 1971. So, yeah, a while ago.
Never again will I joke with Berit about our cats having such short memories that they don't remember who we are when we're gone for more than 8 hours or so (actually, I know that's not true - my late kitty Rogar The Evil Behemoth would go up to a year in Maine without seeing me, and would definitely know me when he saw me again).
Oh, boy, I'm getting woozy here. Better lie down and put on a video or something and rest a bit. I've been thinking of watching Terry Gilliam's Brazil, but that might be a hair too nightmarish in my present state.
Ah, who am I kidding, that's exactly how I like it. Brazil it is then . . .
That Fuzzy Bastard
Date: 2008-03-01 08:45 pm (UTC)From: (Anonymous)I have to admit, of all the implausible things to drop from Welles' mouth, the one I find hardest to comprehend is the idea of Welles' "digging" something...
Re: That Fuzzy Bastard
Date: 2008-03-01 09:02 pm (UTC)From:"Dig" was a favorite of his. The other main two, even more implausible perhaps, are a consistent use of "bread" for money (he often refers to not being able to get the bread to make some movie, or of doing some acting role for the bread) and "fuzz" for police. Really.
It's jarring at first, but it gets charming the more you read it and imagine it rumbling out of him as he talks about the youth of today (ie; the 70s) not trusting the fuzz, and why should they?
Welles was actually pretty precise about words. In a late Jaglom film he expresses sadness that, while he supports homosexuals in all efforts toward equality, he hates the usurping of the word "gay," which he says is a perfectly good word that has no exact English equivalent (and I notice he uses it regularly in its classic form throughout the Bogdanovich book).
Hell, both Harry Partch and Richard Foreman used "dig" in manifesto pieces the same way. Every now and then I drop it. It's a good word for using in that context.
Re: That Fuzzy Bastard
Date: 2008-03-02 07:23 am (UTC)From: (Anonymous)Oh, and I can say that when I wouldn't see my cat for a year, she would *definitely* remember me. Granted, she slept on my childhood bed, so that may have helped.
Rough cut is done! It's looking great---the slasher movie is, as expected, awesome. The bad news is that it's coming in at 6:30, and the contest demands no more than 5:00---I'm going to contact someone Monday and see if we can get away with it, as I'd hate to cut anyone's lines. I have now put in some of the music available for use in the contest, and the effect is great---your freak-out is even better with some ominous strings.