Surprisingly Busy Day

So, no music update today, as promised, and it's not even the "today" I promised to update on anymore. Friday went by with me taking most of the day to prepare two of my scripts, Spell and Spacemen from Space! for the site Indie Theater Now -- since I write the plays to direct myself at The Brick, I sometimes write in a chatty manner that's specific to the actors and space, and won't read well to others. Tomorrow I'll try and fix up At the Mountains of Slumberland for the site, but that one will take a lot more work.

Also spent time today answering some more congratulations on the nytheatre.com thing and running errands -- post office, library. I'm getting in daily trips to the library, mostly in dropping off and picking up books in Richard Stark's Parker series, which Berit and I are going through like popcorn, though I don't think they'll have any immediate influence on any work I'll be doing.

By chance, I've been reading a number of memoirs, mostly of actors -- apart from Patti Smith's excellent Just Kids. That was the first one I read, and unfortunately it was so much better than the rest that the remainder of the memoirs have not looked so good. I've recently gone through Hal Holbrook's, Jane Lynch's, John Lithgow's, Diane Keaton's, Kristin Hersh's, Roger Ebert's, Tina Fey's, and the journals of Spalding Gray, as well as a combined bio of Carole King/Joni Mitchell/Carly Simon. Now I have a new one from Judi Dench. It wasn't intentional, but this will come in handy for my work on next year's play Removal, which is about a writer (or so it seems) looking back on his life and trying to revise it through obsessive revisions in his art. So these will be good to see how some artists do it, even when they aren't so enlightening or entertaining. Also, we've been watching Ken Russell's films in order, so I've finally gotten to see most of his early composer biographies for the BBC, which will also be a good source of inspiration.

I also have a nice stack of library books on branding, which are needed for research on another upcoming show, Invisible Republic #3, but I really need to get into those, and I probably won't be able to until after Xmas.

Tonight's viewing, while I was working on the scripts, was Sidney Pollack's Jeremiah Johnson -- meh; nothing wrong with it exactly, just . . . didn't grab me; Vincente Minnelli's Two Weeks in Another Town -- fun big Hollywood camp, with a great crazed car ride through Rome sequence (Berit, familiar with the automotive fatalities of Contempt and Toby Dammit, now calls out, "No, you're making a movie in Rome in the 60s, don't get into that car!" when the convertible shows up); and Robert Aldrich's The Legend of Lylah Claire, which was almost disappointing, though entertaining, in a bad-good movie way, until it got to the ending, which nearly made the whole thing a masterpiece -- I had heard that the last 2 minutes of this film were NUTS and either ruined it or saved it, depending on your point of view, and the psycho ending isn't even that long actually, but for me it made everything before it worthwhile. But whoa, is it nuts. Then it was the last of the available BBC Russell bios, the amazing Song of Summer. Really some of his finest work, though I still prefer the operatic, perverse Russell of 1970-1977.

Then, while internetting my merry way and enjoying some hot tea and cold aquavit, back to some of the TV shows we cycle around between on Netflix Instant. Tonight, a second season Mission: Impossible episode, a recent 30 Rock and now, as usual, several How It's Made episodes until sleep finally comes.

Tomorrow, fixing scripts, researching, and finally getting back to the Weekly Random Ten lists. And maybe some first words on Westerns. Berit and I have been watching American Western movies chronologically, starting with Stagecoach from 1939 and planning on ending with The Shootist (1976). We're up to 1972, and 134 movies of a 147-movie list, and I'm still not sure what I might do with what I've learned, or even what I've really learned. I just knew that it was important to know these movies better if I really wanted to GET movies and America and the 20th century in some important ways, but it's not something that can be intellectualized or verbalized so well. Or maybe that's the point.

Weekly Random Ten

Reading, researching, wasting time on internet, waiting for B to wake up.

Today, more of the same. Plus, as mentioned, preparing a script for online publication. There are events and shows I'd like to get to, but I don't think that's going to happen. So it goes. I think today's westerns to watch (if we can get them all in) will wind up being Support Your Local Gunfighter, The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean, and maybe The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid, none of which I've seen.

Still waiting to hear back from the casts of our August shows, ObJects, Antrobus, and Gone, about whether they'd be available and interested in coming back and doing the shows again sometime early next year to make up for the performances we lost with Hurricane Irene. So far, 11 of the 21 actors have responded, and those positively, so that's a good start. Maybe this will actually happen.

There's 24,779 tracks in my trusty iPod. And yet, even after 5 years of using it constantly, there are 8,483 tracks in it that haven't been played. Here's a random playlist of ten from among those unheard tracks (with links to online versions of the songs, where available).

1. "I Got Loaded" - Peppermint Harris - The Aladdin Records Story
2. "All Last Night" - George Smith - My Guitar Wants to Kill Your Mama
3. "Crazy" - 999 - 999
4. "The Bloody Assizes" - Julian Cope - Fried
5. "Wind-Up Toys" - The Electric Prunes - Lost Dreams
6. "Someday You'll be King" - MX-80 Sound - Out of the Tunnel
7. "Packin' Up" - Delilah - Lost Deep Soul Treasures volume 3
8. "Just Play Music" - Big Audio Dynamite - Super Hits
9. "Absolutal Bastard" - Las Comadrejas - We Are Ugly But... We Have the Music
10. "All Night Operator" - Bryan Ferry - In Your Mind

Hey, cool -- for the first time in doing one of these Random Tens, I was able to find a YouTube for every one of the songs (okay, the Julian Cope is a demo version, but close enough). Here's a spiffy playlist of all the above (with bonus 11th track):

Okay, back to figuring out how to make NECROPOLIS 3: At the Mountains of Slumberland read like a real script.