Friday Cat Blogging: Leftovers

Well, with a free Flickr account, as noted a couple of weeks ago, you only get so much photo space you can upload each month, and I exceeded mine back then. So I'm stuck with a last couple of as-yet-unposted photos of that sparkling duo of dynamic felines, Hooker and Simone . . .





Yup, here they are once again in "Family Size/Fun Size" comparison mode. This is the photo I meant to post two weeks back, and messed up and instead put up one I'd already posted.


And we finally got our books up on shelves earlier this year, so they don't have a favorite hangout anymore:





What always gets me about some of these photos is how dopey he looks, when he is a cat of above-average intelligence (which, as Berit would remind me, is still pretty stupid), while she looks all knowing and clever, and (sweet and loving as she is) she's dumb as a post. If there's even a thought in her head in that look at the camera, it would be just, "Mommy?"


But, yes, sweet. He's cuddled up with Berit in the other room, and she's next to me on the bed, purring and trying to hug my mouse-operating hand. Good cats.

Friday Random Ten

This morning, I've been trying to get some work done with next-to-no inspiration -- the video Bryan Enk asked me to make for his anthology of short horror films. As it has been for weeks with this piece (Software), I have the concept, I have the equipment needed, I just don't have the spark. I'm making the whole thing with the built-in camera/microphone on Berit's iMac, and I did some tests yesterday, and some improvs "in character" to see if it worked, and it did, and I think I could probably improv the whole thing and cut it down to good material, but I still don't feel inspired because I don't see the whole thing in my head, structurally. I could probably just do it and figure that out in the editing, and it wouldn't matter in the end for this piece, but it's hard for me to get started without a specific structure completely THERE in my head. It's basically a guy's video diary as he gradually goes nuts, but I haven't got the time period straight in my head, or the levels of nuttiness he has to be at in each entry, and, even more importantly, what he physically presents in each new entry -- I've kept myself unshaven and slovenly for days, thinking we'd start with me looking like this at the end of the piece and moving backwards, and I'd clean myself up and shave more and more as we move backwards (probably lose the whole beard for the first entry, dammit), but as I don't know the rhythm of the whole thing, I don't know how clean/messy/etc. to make each piece (and he has to go back and forth, of course).


Now I just feel icky and desperately want a shower and shave, but I'm holding back, in case inspiration suddenly strikes.


Berit now seems more into getting this piece done than I do, but then she has a craft challenge to deal with, which always focuses her incredibly, even when, it seems, the challenge is in creating a small but extremely unpleasant gore effect -- which when first mentioned by me made her cringe, and then put her hands over her ears and yell that she didn't want to hear any more about it. Then she got into thinking about how to make it happen, so we'll see. She may just order me to buckle down and do the damn thing and stop agonizing over it (just so she can solve the problem of the effect).


And the iTunes came up with an oddly "heavy" mix on random this morning as I moped . . .


1. "Walkin' in the Bach's World" - The Stradivarius - Mindexpanders 2: In Search of the Exstatic Kinetic Bombastic Multi Freaked-Up Outerspacial Groove (yes, really, that's an album)
2. "Very Rare" - The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion - Orange
3. "Painter Man" - The Creation - How Does It Feel To Feel?
4. "Ding Dong! The Witch Is Dead" - The Fifth Estate - Bubblegum Classics Volume 1
5. "Just to Be with You" - Paul Butterfield - The Electra Sessions
6. "Beat Girl" - ZZ & De Masters - Nederbeat The B-Sides 1
7. "Politician" - Cream - The Very Best of Cream
8. "Dans un Jardin d'Amour" - Johnny Halliday - Souvenirs Souvenirs
9. "The Black Page #2" - Frank Zappa - You Can't Do That On Stage Anymore Volume 6
10. "Stengun" - Linda van Dyck - Beatmeisjes


Well, "heavy" except for the bubblegum and Johnny Halliday tracks, which wound up just feeling creepy and ironic in this context. That last track - "Stengun" - is a recent download, and woah, it's great. Sounds like The Yardbirds with a cool, distant, female singer.


I'll have to start culling the iTunes soon, I think. I've added a lot of indiscriminate downloads recently, and it's getting really 60s Pop/Garage/Italian Movie Soundtracks heavy. A little too much kitsch, maybe. I didn't think of it as kitsch when I loaded it, but, well, there's stuff I don't want to hear all that often (though no Italian groove instrumentals came up above, and the two Dutch tracks and the Creation track are keepers in any case). I cut 150 songs out a few days ago, and could go deeper if necessary.


There's about 16,100 songs in there at 54 gigs. The rule is no going above 60 gigs, so if there's good stuff to add, mediocre stuff has to go. The point is to have an iTunes of all stuff that would be good and interesting to listen to completely on shuffle. And I'll start cutting into the Zappa, Residents, and Elvis Costello for Berit's sake (though the Beefheart stays; there isn't really very much of it).

Weekend in Will-burg

So a good deal of other theatre blog-type-people will be involved in the PRELUDE 06 events of the next two days at CUNY. I cannot attend, much as I'd like to, primarily as I'm in rehearsal for Temptation tomorrow morning and Sunday evening at The Brick, but also because I'll also be continuing to spend the rest of those days at The Brick (and possibly other W-Burg locales) enjoying the New WPA Free Fest being put on by The New WPA (that is, Williamsburg Performance Association).

I'm in rehearsal from 9 am to 12 noon tomorrow, ugh, but then there's a whole damn day of cool stuff at The Brick:


1.30 - 2.00 pm Chris Harcum performs Some Kind of Pink Breakfast
2.15 - 3.00 pm Debby Schwartz plays n sings fer you
3.15 - 3.45 pm Lisa Ferber's new play An Evening with Molly Hadafew
4.00 - 4.30 pm Deenie Nast
4.45 - 5.15 pm Cousin Hubie
5.30 - 6.00 pm Eric Davis
6.15 - 6.45 pm Tom X. Chao and Erin Leahy perform "Lunch in Los Angeles" from Freak Out Under the Apple Tree
7.00 - 7.30 pm The Bitter Poet
7.45 - 8.15 pm Trav S.D.
8.30 - 9.15 pm Michele Carlo's It Came from New York
9.30 - 10.00 pm The Curse of Cursed Mountain
10.00 - ??? pm Oddball Mini-Filmfest (very likely including a cult favorite musical in black-and-white about the Sixth Dimension)


And it's FREE! There's lots going on in other Williamsburg spaces, too -- if you can't read the map/guide I linked to above, I have it on good authority they'll be handed out at Williamsburg subway stations all day.

And there's even more (and still FREE) on Sunday, including a reading of Plato's Symposium as a "radio theatre extravaganza" at The Brick from 2.00 - 5.00 pm. I will be participating as a reader in that one, apparently . . .


Monday night, The Brick will be the locale for the New York Theatre Review fundraiser, which I hope to also attend (this one costs $20, and I don't know if I have the cash right now, but if you do, it's a good cause, and you SHOULD GO) -- many of the familiar theatre-blog-type-people will be attending this one, too. I hope to see some familiar faces there.

Things Can't Be All Bad

There are still things at times that can lift the weight from my heart, and not make me not despair for my race.



Here is one of those things:



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And if that doesn't help, just try making some stupid noises . . .


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