2000 Light Years From Home

Well, here I am in Portland, Maine again, after a long day.

Sunday started with a 9.30 am meeting at Martin Denton's place to record a podcast for nytheatrecast - me, Jeff Lewonczyk, and Jon Stancato discussing our work in creating theatre that comes in some way from film with moderator Trav S.D. It wound up being a pretty cool discussion, but we only had enough time to scratch the surface of the subject - as Trav noted, the four of us could have had a fine old time talking about this for hours.

I'll note it here when it's posted.

Well, the day had actually started much earlier by dragging myself out of bed and packing and trying to make sure I didn't forget anything I needed and saying goodbye to the partner and the cats, which is hard enough to do, even for two days. Actually gets harder each time this happens, which I wouldn't have expected once upon a time.

After the podcast, Jeff and I drove over to The Brick for Babylon Babylon rehearsal (and as Jon was rehearsing at The Battle Ranch, he crammed himself in Petey Plymouth as well, among the overflow of props that fill it, as usual - not comfortable, but convenient).

I was there to see a runthru and figure out the lights - they had to start with quite a bit of work, so I only got to see about 2/3rds of a run before they had to split, but that was enough to figure out the light plot and most of the cues. Turned out, to my relief, to be a lot simpler than I expected.

On the other hand, I was surprised to discover the time I should have them ready was a little sooner than I expected, so I have to rush back to The Brick for Tuesday night's rehearsal, do the light hang after their run, then write all the cues, or do that the following day so they can run with lights on Wednesday night. Tight, but doable.

The show looks great, too - Jeff may have to cut some things for pace reasons, which made me wince, as he'll be cutting some great stuff, but for the overall rhythm and feel of the show it's the right thing to do - as well as for keeping this intermissionless show under the 2-hour mark. I'll really miss some of the deletions, though.

Out of there and on the road at 5 pm. The drive up to Maine was half-pleasant, half-not - I'd decided to listen to my chronological Rolling Stones playlist on the iPod, and got from the first 1963 recordings to halfway through Exile on Main St. in the 5.5-hour trip - sometimes I just like listening to a band or artist's work pretty much in its entirety, from start to finish, seeing how the work developed over time (though this playlist is missing, for some reason, "Sympathy for the Devil" and the Rice Krispies commercial they did in the early 60s).

The Stones' songs got pretty dark, though, just as the sky did and a heavy rain started, and wound up making the rest of the trip pretty creepy - driving on a pitch-black highway through Lowell, Massachusetts, with rain smears making everything ahead of me blurry and uncertain, as "Gimme Shelter" played (very loud) was both a beautiful and unsettling experience (the whole great Let It Bleed album was actually top-drawer "music-to-make-you-feel-deep-forboding" scoring for that part of the trip - luckily Sticky Fingers made things quite a bit lighter right as I crossed into New Hampshire).

And now I'm here, and after having drowsiness problems at the wheel once darkness fell, I'm wide awake and bored. Usually, Berit and I get our surfing-the-zeitgeist TV fix up here, since we don't have it at home, but the only things even slightly bearable on now are two films on Turner Classic Movies - Murnau's Sunrise followed by Godard's Contempt - two movies I own on DVD and have watched many many times, and (being, respectively, a silent movie and in French) not the best films to have as "background noise." Fox Movie Channel is playing Russ Meyer & Roger Ebert's Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, but I'm not quite in the mood for that classic right now, I think.

Tomorrow, the joys of dental extraction.

Wait a minute . . . even though they listed it as "letterboxed," TCM is playing a very bad pan-and-scan print of Contempt, scratched and nasty-looking, with English titles . . . oh, jeez, and it's dubbed. Well, screw that, over to FMC for some Meyer/Ebert action . . .

Mixed Bag

Various and sundry:

The video and synopsis for the episode I directed of Bryan Enk and Matt Gray's Penny Dreadful is now online at this page HERE. If you don't know the story so far, it'd be best to go back and read the detailed synopses of the previous four episodes. Better yet, take the time and watch the really great videos.

Nice to see this record - I was stuck up in the booth so I couldn't really get a good view of the show - some great acting work here that I was only able to hope was happening - Becky Byers and Bryan Enk both shine in the close-ups. Dina did as good as job as I think could be done in taping this one (there are bits from both performances we did in the video, two different camera setups), but unfortunately due to staging and audience placement, this one winds up being not as good a video as the previous episodes - much more like a standard record-of-a-performance video than the others, which came out so surprisingly well. Oh well, the show's there.

Unfortunately, I've only been able to watch it without sound as yet - the computer I'm on up here has no sound, for some arcane reason, so I don't know how that worked out. I can check it on another computer when I sign off here.

Three excellent posts on the late Charlton Heston from Glenn Kenny, The Self-Styled Siren, and Mark Evanier - I especially like this quote from the last:

Mr. Heston's politics were not mine but I see no reason to believe they were anything but earnest on his part. People do change as they get older. I think the reason he so irked some was not that he "demagogued" but that he was the kind of speaker who sounds like he's demagoguing if he's ordering a tuna melt. Even if you didn't have in mind the image of him as Moses, he had a way of sounding like everything he uttered was chiselled onto stone tablets. It's what made him compelling as an actor, at least in certain roles...and made him seem uncommonly arrogant if he voiced a worldview you found questionable.

I really don't entirely agree with the philosophy behind this, but the man asked for it -- Uwe Boll was made aware of the fact that there is an internet petition up demanding that he stop making terrible TERRIBLE movies. He laughed at the fact that there were only about 18,000 signatures on it, and said that he would only consider it if it got to a million.

The petition is HERE. It's now up to about 64,400 names. Fans of videogames, horror, and films in general may do as they see fit . . .

And finally, Patrick Stewart gives a lovely, sharp interview to someone from New York magazine and includes an apparently serious threat to kneecap her if he's quoted out of context. Don't fuck with Sejanus, lady (or Gurney Halleck, for that matter).