collisionwork | Jan. 2nd, 2009

And again, happy new year!

Berit and I have been continuing to hibernate at home for days, working on script stuff and other business for the year to come (and finishing up stuff from the year past).

I've been watching a lot of Universal monster movies from the 1930s-40s -- pretty much all of them in chronological order. It was slightly for research for Spacemen from Space, but mainly for my own enjoyment, though it was also re-igniting in my head an old project David LM Mcintyre and I had been discussing as our follow-up to the collage-piece Even the Jungle -- this one would have been called A Landscape of the Universal Horror and would have been a journey through the human-on-human atrocities of the 20th Century using the texts of horror movies made or distributed by Universal Pictures.

Sometimes I think about getting back to that, or the other one we considered, Bird/BRAINS, a retelling/combination of Chekhov's The Seagull, Ibsen's The Wild Duck, and Strindberg's The Pelican in an examination of the family unit in the last 100 years or so of World Theatre. I had this last idea around 1992 (when David did a deconstruction of Seagull, which I acted in, for his composition class with Anne Bogart), and I don't know if I mentioned it to A Certain Someone back in the late 90s at NADA, but that Someone went and did this very idea a few years later at Symphony Space. But that was for one night only, and I'm sure was a lot different than what I'd do with the idea (still pissed me off, though).

Of course, I never really licked certain issues with either of these projects, and I cannibalized the concept-setting of Bird/BRAINS for Ten Nights in a Bar-Room and the ending of Landscape of the Universal Horror for Kiss Me, Succubus, as well as other bits and pieces of them for other shows here and there, so I'll probably never bother actually making either of them anyway.

Yesterday, another old friend, Sean Rockoff, came by and we hung out and watched videos and laughed a lot -- more at our reactions to what we were watching than the videos themselves, as we were watching a bunch of 2-reel shorts Buster Keaton made for Columbia Pictures around 1938-40. They're TERRIBLE -- made by the exact same people who were making the Three Stooges shorts at the same studio at the same time, with all the same crew and supporting actors and everything. They feel like Stooges shorts that have had the Howard boys and Fine surgically extracted and replaced by Buster Keaton, which just doesn't work. I like the Stooges (I prefer Shemp vastly to Curly, however, who I have trouble watching), but Buster Keaton just DOESN'T work in that world.

There are still some great bits in the films, here and there (especially involving a comedienne named Elsie Ames who apparently annoys many Keaton fans, but DAMN she can take a punch or fall beautifully), but for the most part we were amazed at how while these films were recognizably "comedies," the humor was just missing.

We were laughing more at what I was finding on IMDb as I was looking up info about the people making or in these films, as everything I was saying sounded like something from one of the Firesign Theatre's "TV listings" parody pieces:

"Okay, that's Barbara Jo Allen who did several shorts with the Jules White unit at Columbia as the character 'Vera Vague,' a mean old spinster, who also appeared in the wartime feature Priorities on Parade, 1942, where she and comedian Jerry Colonna sang the Jule Styne song 'Cooperate with Your Air Raid Warden.' She also appeared in the shorts Clunked in the Clink, She Snoops to Conquer, Calling All Fibbers, and the feature Henry Aldrich Plays Cupid, the follow-up to Henry Aldrich Swings It."

The beginnings of another show were born in the midst of our hilarity, but that won't show up until 2011 at the earliest.

Tonight, off for dinner with family again. Here's today's Random Ten off the iPod, with associated links when I could find them:

1. "Theme" - Cibo Matto - Viva! La Woman
2. "The Old Crowd" - Lesley Gore - The Golden Hits of Lesley Gore
3. "Black Butter - Past" - The Strawberry Alarm Clock - Anthology
4. "I Don't Like Him" - Dave Travis & The Premiers - Sin Alley, Vol. 1: Red Hot Rockabilly 1955 - 1962
5. "On Earth My Nina" - They Might Be Giants - Long Tall Weekend
6. "Respect" - The Vagrants - Nuggets: Original Artyfacts From The First Psychedelic Era
7. "Fast Food Service" - The Plasmatics - Beyond The Valley Of 1984
8. "Hornet's Nest" - The Venturas - The History Of Texas Garage Bands In The '60s Volume 3: The AOK RecordStory
9. "Brakhage" - Stereolab - downloaded from somewhere
10. "Since I Lost My Baby" - The Temptations - The Ultimate Collection

We left our camera up at my father & stepmother's on Xmas, so we have no new photos of our little bastards. Here's a little photo booth shot from today of me and each of our cats. First Hooker, the big fuzzy guy, who had yet another epileptic fit this morning and wanted a hug . . .