CollisionWorks

I was REALLY hoping to get away for about two weeks to Maine to buckle down and write the thing, but it looks like have to do some jobs at The Brick at widely separated times during the window I had for a getaway, so I'm stuck here, where writing just doesn't happen as well. I have to get out of the home, I think. Maybe I'll schlep the laptop to The Brick's depressing office space and punch in some 8-hour days next week, just writing and pacing. That means, though, I wouldn't have Berit around. I'm not sure yet if she's going to get co-writing credit on this one, but she's been more involved in the immediate creation of it than usual on my original plays, where she acts as my best critic and bounceboard during the whole process. I do all of the actual writing, and especially the conceptual and structural work, but more and more dialogue in this one is coming out of the two of us improvising scenes in reaction to the actual serials we're watching, so her involvement in more direct here in the creative process (though both of us, I think, agree, it's not quite at co-writer level yet, it may well get there).

Unfortunately, while the majority of the actors I wanted for the other three shows have jumped right in, the 22 people I asked to be in Spacemen have mostly turned me down, or said it's unlikely they'll be available, or said they won't be able to commit fully to an August show until much, much later in the year. So I may have to do a full casting call with this one and bring in a LOT of new people (apart from the people I asked, most of the people I know just don't fit in the world of Spacemen). So it goes. It was a lot more fun writing it for actors I knew and liked and figured would knock it out of the ballpark easily.

In between writing, planning, and checking in online, I continue to try to cull enough tracks out of the iPod to put in all the tracks I've got in the last year that I'd like to have there (I pretty much filled up the damned thing and stopped my regular dropping in of any and all music I was finding on March 11 of last year). I've dropped about 800 tracks from it, and now added back in about 350 from the last year. This will take a while.

So, from 25,621 tracks now in the iPod, this week's Random Ten (with related video links):

1. "Pricks Up Front (Presto Con Brio)" - Andy Prieboy - From Pauper to a King
2. "Anthology" - The Kay Gees - Keep On Bumpin' & Master Plan
3. "Run Run Run (live 1967)" - The Velvet Underground - The Gymnasium - 1967
4. "'21 Sounds For The Sunset' - LP Promo Spot" - Radio Record Promo - Psychedelic Promos & Radio Spots, vol. 1
5. "Macumba" - Piero Umiliani - Angeli Bianchi... Angeli Neri
6. "Pray Them Bars Away" - Lee Hazlewood - Cowboy In Sweden
7. "New Cooter Boogie" - Southern Culture On The Skids - Ditch Diggin'
8. "KRLA, King Of The Wheels (Full Song)" - The Bobby Fuller Four - Psychedelic Promos & Radio Spots, vol. 5
9. "Spearmint Pup" - Mike Keneally - Hat
10. "Catch A Wave" - The Beach Boys - Greatest Hits

Oh, it's March 6. What's happening today? Oh, right . . . the Watchmen movie.

Don't know if I'm going to see it . . . I think I'll reread the graphic novel today (the 20-year old trade edition I have signed by Alan Moore). Actually, Tasha Robinson at A.V. Club makes it sound like it was, for her, exactly like what I'd expect it to be for me in her piece here -- a fascinating, immersive experience with enough small (and seemingly-small but not really) changes from the book to not-quite-but-almost spoil the whole experience. She notes at the end of the piece (and repeatedly restates in the comments) that she LIKED the movie, but has still has several pages of not-at-all-unimportant problems with it.

The trailers got me somewhat excited about the movie, but the scene excerpts I saw kinda killed that buzz. The scenes I watched looked (mostly) well-acted, (mostly) acceptably staged, (mostly) deeply faithful to the book, and (heavily) boring as all fuck. Enough film writers I respect have positive things to say, overall, about it (and plenty of ones I don't respect are being assholes about it in general, which can actually also be a plus), and I'd enjoy seeing a big IMAX experience film again, so I'll probably go (especially now discovering there's an IMAX screen where it's playing right nearby in Sheepshead Bay), but I'm also a little pissed that I'll be seeing a cut-down version as opposed to the full version that will be on the DVD. I enjoyed Fellowship of the Rings on the big screen at first, but once I saw the expanded (and improved by it) DVD version, I just got more and more angry watching the later two Lord of the Rings films in the theatre, knowing there would be a better, longer version released later, feeling a bit ripped-off paying full price to see a "tab" version.

Well, however the film works out, it couldn't be any worse than the 80s Saturday-morning cartoon spinoff version . . . (hee, hee) . . .

Hey, we got some new cat pictures! Amazing, considering that their skills (especially Moni) for immediately walking away, turning, blinking or whatever whenever we get a nice shot set up have gotten more and more acute. Now we have to take pictures when they're sleeping, for the most part. Like in a box of old props and costume pieces . . .

Or on a chair . . .

Or at the other end of the couch from where I'm writing . . .

Or, when I'm taking a nap break from writing, on top of me, in photos I don't discover Berit's taken until I download the camera . . .

Maybe next week, I'll get some more active photos of the two. Maybe drinking from their new razzafrazzin' fancy-ass water dish.

While we were in Maine last time, we finally bit the bullet and spent some money on a fancy drinking fountain for them. Moni has always seemed to prefer running water, and follows us into the bathroom on every trip so she can stand on the sink and drink at the faucet, if we'll turn it on for her. So we decided to get a powered water bowl that runs water down a plastic dome into a bowl, thinking she'd love it (and that Hooker, who's pretty easygoing, would accept it).

Nope.

Moni has been terrified of the damn thing - she hates the motor sound, we think, and more and more demands the sink faucet instead, and won't drink from her new (and for us, expensive) toy -- I've been worried about her getting dehydrated, but can you check this with a skin response test, and she seems okay. It took her forever just to drink from a normal bowl we put next to the thing! Hooker didn't like it at first, but soon took to licking the water off the dome as they're supposed to. We thought this might give the always-jealous Moni some ideas when she saw him do it, but no. Berit even got down on the floor and tried to demonstrate it for her. No go.

Last night, B said that she FINALLY saw Moni drinking from the new thing. We'll see if she's got it down now . . . I'll believe it when I see it.

Recent fun (mostly video) items to pass on . . .

Video and commercial director Ron Winter's keyboard triggered collection of drums and "dance music" sounds. Indulge your inner beatmaker by creating new backing tracks from this playable collection of cliched, obsolete sounds that will probably become hip again two years after David Bowie starts playing with them five years from now.

From Smearballs, the inexplicable "Sweatin' Like a Farm Animal, Cool as a Daisy":

The Three Stooges still owed Columbia several shorts on their contract at the time Shemp Howard died, so the films were completed with a "Fake Shemp" (a somewhat largely accepted bit of film terminology now, thanks to Sam Raimi). Here's most of the Stooges footage that features a Fake Shemp (comedian Joe Parma):

Motörhead's "Ace of Spades" as re-imagined through the miracle of Microsoft Songsmith:

What R2-D2 is actually saying throughout Star Wars: Episode I: The Phantom Menace:

"The Short and Simple Story of The Credit Crisis," a thesis design project by Jonathan Jarvis, about 10 minutes, in two parts. Part One:

PART TWO HERE

I miss Falco (and I miss cheap chroma-key music videos that looked like this):

(alternate video for this song HERE, which I hadn't seen before)

Recently, thanks to the book Rip It Up and Start Again by Simon Reynolds, I've been going through an obsession with the post-punk era, and (connected but not always the same thing) the post-Sex Pistols work of Johnny Rotten/John Lydon. Here are two favorites from one of the most hypnotic frontmen in popular musics (the second featuring the fine fine superfine Mr. Africa Bambaataa):

And finally, courtesy Gawker, the "BREATHTAKING DESIGN STRATEGY" created by The Arnell Group for Pepsi.

Pepsi spent good money, many millions and millions of dollars, on the creation of this new version of their logo, and the accompanying campaign, so obviously, it had to be justified with an extensive document that says more than "we think this is an improvement on the logo that will continue the brand recognition while being more attractive and bringing more sales." So what you get is an amazing plan that discusses the new Pepsi logo in terms of Feng Shui, the Golden Mean, Magnetic Dynamics, the Earth's Dynamo, and the Gravitational Pull of Pepsi. Really. No, really.

I wish I'd had this document handy before I created Everything Must Go; I could have REALLY used some of it for that show.

To see the full 27 pages of breathtaking bullshit, check it out HERE (it's a PDF file, so if those don't load well for you in a browser, download it and enjoy - it's easier to read that way in any case . . .).

More recently, Pepsi used The Arnell Group to rebrand their Tropicana line, and wound up with a gigantic failure -- do any of these people actually buy stuff in stores themselves . . ?

Today, after several days of medical procedures and running around for different theatre work in different places all around, it's time for silly fun at home. Hope you enjoy yourself today, too.

It almost makes me want to try and work out Spacemen from Space as an actual monthly serial to do at The Brick, but that piece - though it's a play broken up into 6 serial "episodes" - wouldn't actually work in serial form without major changes (and there'd be no way to keep the cast together as needed, month-to-month; Bryan and Matt have been able to work around actor conflicts in a way my story couldn't).

Work continues on Spacemen and the other August shows; nothing more interesting to report there. Casting work continues on all of them, to various extents -- suggestions come in, meetings are set up. About a third of the people I wanted for the cast of Spacemen are interested, but either can't confirm or don't think they can do it. {sigh}

I'm meeting this weekend with Trav S.D. at Theatre for a New City where I'll be directing his play Kitsch: Or, Two for the Price of One in November - it's a version of The Comedy of Errors set in immediate post-Wall Berlin, with the sets of identical twins (sent to either side of the Iron Curtain) being babies formerly experimented on by Nazi doctors. Very funny. Really. And it'll be a big thing for me to direct/design at TNC -- a new space, a different kind of play.

So I have a bunch of great plays coming up this year. I am really, really looking forward to getting started this Friday with the first reading of A Little Piece of the Sun by the full cast (assuming I cast one last role by then; I'm seeing a couple of people tomorrow).

Unfortunately, I have to undergo a little medical procedure on Friday before that. It's nothing major, but not all that pleasant, and I do have to be knocked out for it. I've already postponed this once, and it's a pain to reschedule, and at the same time it's almost impossible to get the whole Little Piece cast together right now, so I can't really give up either of these Friday appointments. I'm hoping I'll be recovered enough by Friday night to properly supervise and participate in the reading, and that Berit won't wind up having to read my part.

I may be continuing to think and act like I'm ten years younger and can do things like this with near-superhuman stamina. I'll find out two days from now just how much stamina I have, I guess . . .

Unfortunately, I forgot to bring my camera to the Penny tech this weekend before the shows, so I didn't get any good shots of my own. Bryan took pictures though, and has posted them on the Penny Facebook site. I downloaded a bunch and cleaned them up as best as I could, but their still not quite what I could have gotten with my own camera.

But I was quite pleased with the look of this month's episode ("The House Where Bad Things Happen" -- a quote from me about the Cyrus Pierce house, where the episode I directed - and this one - almost entirely took place), so here's some of the better shots I could fix from what Bryan took:

( PENNY DREADFUL #11 in 15 Photos )

The FINAL episode of Penny Dreadful, "The Last Century," plays at The Brick Saturday, March 28 at 11.00 pm, and Sunday, March 29 at 2.00 pm. We're trying to arrange a THIRD show on that weekend as well, as this will be a big finale (probably in two acts with intermission) and we've been selling out all the shows the last couple of months, even without all of our audience "regulars" able to make it to each performance (hell, now that we've had 65 actors appear in the serial since it started, we could more than sell out one house just with all the Penny Dreadful alums coming back!).

And can I say that I'm really REALLY jazzed that Matt & Bryan have asked me to return as a "special guest director" for one sequence in the final episode? Kinda like Tarantino on Sin City.

Can't say much about it yet - hell, I don't really KNOW anything about it yet - but I guess I get to come back and deal with some of the things that I supervised in the full episode I directed, #5: "The Deb of Destruction, or The Poor Little Witch Girl." Bryan knows I'm drawn to the darker, unsettling or scary parts of Penny, so I'm hoping and thinking they're giving me something good and NASTY to design and stage next time.

Bryan and I are the spoil-sports with Penny. We want to unnerve and upset people while entertaining them with this, and we get a little pissed sometimes at the large amount of laughter the show is getting in - to us - inappropriate places. Yes, it's a melodrama, deliberately overplayed to a certain extent, and over-the-top in general, and with plenty of intentional laughs in it, but we have more and more been getting an audience that comes in a bit drunk and rowdy and finds EVERYTHING funny.

So with #11, there was, in the writing and design, some real effort made to dampen this aspect. Three continuing characters were killed off, including the nominal hero (whose wife had been horribly killed in the previous episode). The two most audience-pleasing comic characters have also been offed in the last two episodes (one, as I had hoped, getting the "Scatman Crothers in The Shining" treatment, rushing to save the hero for the two episodes previous, then getting blown away almost instantly on showing up). As Bryan and I kept saying as we dry-teched #11, at times making it as assaultive as we could in lights and sound, "We're not fucking around here, folks." This is a gaslit, moody, pulpy melodrama, with quite a few deliberate laughs, yes, but it is also a work of horror.

So next time at Penny . . . The Paradise of Destruction . . . ANARCHY!

. . . heh-heh-heh . . .

I did this for my blog last January when it was going around then. The result of that one can be seen HERE. Berit did hers a few days later, and can be seen HERE

However, I haven't seen the back cover part of the meme make it to Facebook. Here's how it went when I did it a year ago:

1. Reload Flickr's interesting photos page twice. Use the seventh picture, but desaturate it.

2. Reload the random quotes page. Take the last few words of each quote to make song titles. Use them all.

So here's what I got for the back cover of that exciting new album by THOC2, To Fly in Formation:

Now YOU try it, if you haven't already . . .

Nice to be back, but I may go away a little bit again next month to do the writing of Spacemen from Space, once my research is done.

Today, we watched all 12 episodes of The Lost City, a 1935 serial that makes the insane The Phantom Empire look like a model of narrative coherence and thematic clarity. Wow. Brilliant and crazed (and, yes, racist as all get out). Can't wait to show this one to the company of Spacemen from Space, once I get that show written and cast. I have another 5 or 6 serials in the DVD pile to get through now as research before I can get to the actual writing of the piece.

Otherwise, the August shows progress fine. First reading of Little Piece in two weeks, finishing up casting and setting up readings of Blood on the Cat's Neck and George Battaile's Bathrobe. More tech for Penny Dreadful next week, and a reading for Edward Einhorn. Rehearsal with David Finkelstein and a Brick Staff Meeting tomorrow. The year speeds up.

Today's Random Ten, from a current 26,108 tracks in the iPod:

1. "Incense & Peppermints" - The Strawberry Alarm Clock - Incense & Peppermints
2. "Hello, I Love You" - The Doors - Waiting for the Sun
3. "Record Ban Blues" - Dinah Washington - Mercury Blues & Rhythm Story 1945-1955 - East Coast Blues
4. "Sundown" - Don & The Galaxies - Songs The Cramps Taught Us Vol. 2
5. "Dog Door" - Tom Waits - Orphans: Bastards
6. "Ne Boude Pas" - Richard Anthony - Rato's Nostalgia Collection 28
7. "Another Generation" - Fishbone - Fishbone
8. "Balansa Pema" - Jorge Ben - Samba Esquema Novo
9. "Intro" - James Kochalka - Superstar
10. "All By Myself" - Johnny Thunders & The Heartbreakers - L.A.M.F. Revisited

No new photos of our own cats to share. I was going to embed a killer video of a Bengal kitten fighting over food here, but it's un-embedable -- you can see it HERE, though (the various videos up on YouTube nearly convince me that someday I'd like to have a Bengal, but on the other hand, they're cute and entertaining in the videos by being boisterous, loud, and mischievous, so maybe not . . .).

Oh, but here's a kitten in Goa, India, that REALLY wants some food . . .

And here's two news anchors (Robert Jordan & Jackie Bange) at WGN Chicago who have, over years, been gradually creating a little routine to get them through commercial breaks, adding on to it bit by bit. They're going to have to start doing it faster if they keep adding to it . . .

And I've been wanting to see the full version of Mike Jittlov's classic 1979 pixilated short The Wizard of Speed and Time for years -- it was cut up a bit when used in a 1979 Disney TV special, Major Effects - a tie-in special to the upcoming release of The Black Hole, and Jittlov redid the whole thing when he expanded the short into a feature about trying to make the original short. What I remembered of it was very influential on me when I did a bunch of stop-motion/pixilation work in the Animation Departent at NYU/Tisch School of the Arts.

Here's the original full short film:

Melanie Martinez - a favorite actress of mine to work with, as director or fellow actor, and who was in the first three or four plays I directed - posted a photo of us on Facebook in her husband Mark Newell's short video comedy Rock Star, where I played an aspiring Rock God with a lot of talent and no sense of coolness or how to project the proper image. As usual, I hate my performance in the video and how I look (of course, the point is that I look fat and unappealing, but still . . .), but I'm pleased that even for the purposes of acting, I got to stand onstage at CBGB once before it vanished and play guitar (my '82 Les Paul Studio).

So here's Mel (with the '75 Fender covered in Japanese Monster stuff, and the killer platform shoes), me, and Matt Pavoni as "Pandemic Aura" . . .

Okay, now I'm off to The Brick to help a company with some tech problems . . .

The production draft for George Bataille's Bathrobe is nearly finished; I'm hoping to be able to send it to the proposed cast tonight (I have to ask two new people if they'll be in that show, too; my original choices couldn't do it).

Some good constructive work on Spacemen from Space has happened. I won't be doing much more than outlining and structuring Spacemen here, maybe making up some dialogue fragments. I have a bunch of research material for that (I found a cheap DVD set containing 5 full serials) which is on the way to Brooklyn, and I want to go through all of that material before writing the show proper. Berit and I have been spitballing ideas and improvising dialogue together, and I have a better handle on the tone of the show.

I've set up a first reading for A Little Piece of the Sun for later this month (still need to cast one part, the young Andrei Chikatilo, for that one).

I have to get ahold of the three people I asked about being in Blood on the Cat's Neck who haven't responded to see if they're in or not, and if not, move on and finish casting it and set up a first reading.

And I've been able to have time to enjoy a little TV and some rented movies -- the Batman & Robin serial, Tom Schiller's Nothing Lasts Forever, the "Mystery Disk" from the David Lynch Lime Green Box Set (lots of interesting bits and pieces there), Von Trier's Europa (aka Zentropa) and Guy Madden's My Winnepeg (the last two are a GREAT double bill with lots of echoes). I've now got Samuel Fuller's White Dog and Fassbinder's Ali: Fear Eats the Soul to get through (I've seen almost no Fassbinder - only Veronica Voss - and have had little interest in doing so, but now that I'm directing a play of his I feel I have to get a couple of his movies in).

And meanwhile, back in the iPod, there are 26,107 tracks, and these ten came up this morning:

1. "Big Jack TV Show Promo – Buckinghams/Selective Seven/Critters" - TV Promo - Psychedelic Promos & Radio Spots, vol. 7
2. "Vanishing Girl - The Dukes Of Stratosphear - Chips From The Chocolate Fireball
3. "Slip, Slip, Slippin'" - Lou Millet - Sin Alley, Vol. 2: Red Hot Rockabilly 1955 - 1962
4. "Pirate Girls" - The Pinkos - The Pinkos
5. "Way Down In The Hole (live)" - Tom Waits - Big Time
6. "I Wanna Love Him So Bad" - Jelly Beans - Beat of the Pops 16
7. "Regime Of Coincidence, State Of Gravity" - Laibach - Kapital
8. "The Grass Is Greener" - Wall Of Voodoo - Happy Planet
9. "Rich Kids" - Rich Kids - Ghosts of Princes in Towers
10. "Prescription Blues" - Pajo - 1968

Of course, while I brought the camera up, I forgot the cable to connect it to the computer, so no photos from up here. Here's a leftover of Berit and Moni (two fuzzy heads) back home . . .

So here's a cute cat video to fill out the "Friday Cat Blogging" part of the post -- kittens on a Roomba:

And for additional video fun, if you haven't yet seen this video of little David returning from the dentist after a tooth extraction, feeling and showing the effects of the medication he was given, here it is:

And a lot of people are making fun of the omnipresent commercials for the "Snuggie," billed as a "blanket with sleeves, and looking pretty much like a robe put on backwards. Honestly, I'm with Berit -- when we first saw the commercials, she said, "I can't decide if that's the smartest thing I've ever seen, or the stupidest." As we're people who like to snuggle under a blanket on a couch while reading books, we actually understand the attraction of building sleeves into a blanket.

But we also understand those who fall down on the "stupidest thing ever" side, like the people who made this:

And if you'd like to hear a President of the United States (not Richard Nixon) cuss like a sonovabitch, go on over to the Boston Phoenix's site, where you can download - HERE - some brief excerpts from Obama's audiobook of Dreams from My Father, where the then-future President quotes and imitates a foul-mouthed friend, "Ray," and doesn't spare the listener any of Ray's colorful vernacular.

Do as I've done - download the soundbites and drop them into your iPod to pull out and play in party mixes!

It uses some lovely weasel language to equate the Arts (and aquariums and zoos, for that matter), which, yes are not NECESSARY but which have been shown to actually provide economic stimulus (and eventual increased tax revenue) by equating these pursuits with a number of outright luxury fripperies ("zero-gravity chairs?").

Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK) has introduced an amendment to prohibit funds in the economic stimulus bill from going to theaters and arts centers.

The language of the amendment, (Amendment No. 175, as filed) is, "None of the amounts appropriated or otherwise made available by this Act may be used for any casino or other gambling establishment, aquarium, zoo, golf course, swimming pool, stadium, community park, museum, theater, arts center, or highway beautification project, including renovation, remodeling, construction, salaries, furniture, zero-gravity chairs, big screen televisions, beautification, rotating pastel lights, and dry heat saunas."

This amendment may be offered as early as today, Wednesday, February 4th. Call your Senators today and urge a NO vote on the Coburn "Limitation of Funds Amendment No. 175." To reach your Senators, call the Capitol Switchboard at 202-224-3121 and ask for your Senators' offices.

Or if, like me, you have a phone phobia (though phoning is ALWAYS better than emailing), you can find your senators through the home page HERE and leave the message. Unfortunately, it appears that new New York Senator Gillebrand does not as yet have an online presence or comment form, so you have to call her office (202-224-4451).

Thanks for your attention.

Missed any other updates on Friday. It was a tiring drive up from NYC, and I just felt like relaxing, and then got into working on the George Bataille's Bathrobe script and good things were happening, and next thing I knew it was bedtime.

Much the same on Saturday. And I'm hoping for the same later today. Along with some movie-watching research.

For those who don't know, when doing one of Richard Foreman's plays - generally, there are exceptions - Richard prefers that you start with the text as he writes it, that is, just dialogue and occasional stage directions that he has written in one-page fragments, and then scrambled up and reordered and played with until he's decided that it's "a play," and then you create your own characters, settings, plot or action, etc. So I had a copy of Richard's typescript for George Bataille's Bathrobe (it's never been published in one of his book collections) and I transcribed the pages into the computer, along with some of the fascinating mung in Richard's notes around the typewritten text -- there were lots of handwritten corrections and alternative lines in the margins, and I've included everything I possibly could in my production draft as I could.

Reading over just the dialogue, elements of characters and story emerged, and gradually I had a list of characters (and actors I wanted to play them), a definite setting, a sense of how the feel and movement of the show would work, and the overall structure. However, I still don't know WHO it is saying WHICH line a good deal of the way through the script, so I'm now going through and figuring out all the details, assigning the dialogue to the correct characters, and writing in the stage directions so the actors will know what they're supposed to be doing.

On the other shows, A Little Piece of the Sun has 13 out of 14 actors cast, and I'm waiting for some promised recommendations to be emailed to me on the last actor (I got no one I know right for the part). I'm setting up a first reading for later this month on that one. The Fassbinder play, Blood on the Cat's Neck, has had it's production draft typed up and finished and has been sent to the proposed cast -- 7 of the 10 actors contacted are in; I'm waiting to hear from the other three (though two of them told me in person not long ago it sounded good to them).

So I just need to finish Bathrobe and Spacemen from Space, which I have to write from scratch, a main reason for coming up here to Maine, as I write better away from home.

I was also hoping the great big videostore in town, Videoport, would still have some of the tons of old movie serials they used to, so I could rewatch them as research for Spacemen, which is structured as a cliffhanger serial in six chapters. I had rented them all from the store about 10 years ago. But now? No dice - they were on VHS, and no one ever rented them, so they're long gone. The only serial they have now is the 1949 Batman & Robin, so I got that. I'll have to watch more of the serials I need to see online, which I find annoying and difficult to focus on.

So later, serial. Right now, a Random Ten from the 26,125 tracks on the iPod:

1. "Kidnapping" - Karl Heinz Shäffer - Stereo Ultra
2. "Ain't No Cure For Love" - Leonard Cohen - I'm Your Man
3. "Heavy Water" - Ray Davies, His Funky Trumpet & Button Down Brass - The Sound Spectrum
4. "To Win Your Love" - Laurie Wade's Cavaliers - Ugly Things #2: Australia's Indiginous Garage Dwellers
5. "So What!!" - The Lyrics - Nuggets: Original Artyfacts From The First Psychedelic Era, Vol. 3
6. "The Curse Of Millhaven" - Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds - Murder Ballads
7. "Berlin (live 1978)" - Lou Reed - Take No Prisoners
8. "Ultra Twist" - The Cramps - Flamejob
9. "Jailhouse Rock " - The End - Pebbles Volume 6 - Chicago 1
10. "Somebody Somewhere (Solo)" - Andy Prieboy - online single download

Looking for a sharable version of that last song, instead I found Edwin Vacek's excellent homemade/found footage videos for three other recent online song releases by Andy Prieboy, the second frontman for one of my favorite bands, Wall of Voodoo. He hasn't put out an album, unfortunately, since 1995's amazing Sins of Our Fathers (one of my very favorite records), but he's recently released 6 new songs (plus three variant versions) on his website, including the above song, and these three below (one of the songs not here, "Shine," to my pleasant surprise turned out to feature the other WOV frontman, Stan Ridgway, on harmonica!).

If you like 'em, think about picking them up from Prieboy's site.

"Pricks Up Front":

"Bands":

"Hearty Drinking Men":

The one bad thing about coming up here is that, despite having loaner cat Bappers and loaner dog Sasha here to enjoy, we still miss our own little monsters, even if we know they're being well looked after by Tante Christiaan and Unca Bryan:

I do have something like 10 videos saved up that I haven't shared as yet, so in lieu of new stuff the next week of so, I'll dole those out bit-by-bit. Back with those soon enough . . .

This past weekend we put up Episode 10 of Bryan Enk and Matt Gray's Penny Dreadful serial at The Brick, which went just as well as all the other episodes, and played to another two huge houses (the first of which, as happens sometimes when you do this kind of serial work that veers wildly from the comic to tragic, and your audience is made up of a lot of friends, tended to laugh in inappropriate, sadly-emotional moments as well as at the actual jokes).

Berit was back co-designing the lights with me on this one, as well as running the board, which was good, as I had to reprise the part of George Westinghouse as a . . . dream? ghost? some other kind of supernatural spirit? . . . that appears to Nikola Tesla. Two more episodes to go, and a lot of plot to resolve -- we're all waiting to see how Matt & Bryan end this saga.

The episode summaries (through #9) and video recordings (through #8) are up at the page linked above. The next episode, I now see, has been given the title "The House Where Bad Things Happen," and I think that's actually a quote from me about the setting for the episode I directed (#5) which almost all took place in the house of a VERY dysfunctional family, where we look to be returning next time (my episode also came to be known as Penny Dreadful: Fire Walk With Me, which gives an idea of its mood, one I expect to come back next time as well).

Here, behind a cut, are my own usable photos from this episode -- if you're on Facebook, you can join the Penny Dreadful group for an even better collection from this episode (and all the others).

( DON'T . . . BE . . . afraid . . . )

Wednesday, Frank Cwiklik and Michele Schlossberg of Danse Macabre Theatrics and Do What Now Media put up a special show, 0109, to celebrate ten years of making theatre in NYC. It was a collage of video and live excerpts from past shows, dance numbers, music, and a new extended comic sketch about how DMTheatrics makes theatre. There were several themed video presentations as well, focusing on aspects of the DMTheatrics style -- a collection of fight scenes, of girls dancing, and of lots and LOTS of cursing (how Frank could leave out my cry of "FOUL FUCKING WINDS!!!" from Bitch Macbeth in that montage however, I will never understand). I appeared in Bryan Enk's original part as "The Candy Butcher" in an excerpt from Who In the Hell Is the Real, Live Lorelei Lee?, which went quite well (it was supposed to be a big secret that I was appearing, but I think word got out a bit).

With the end of the evening came the onscreen announcement that Danse Macabre Theatrics (dead as a company since 2004) is once again back in business, with a list of upcoming productions. Bravo. More from them soon, I'm sure.

Yesterday was an overload of information, starting with an afternoon screening of Godard's Made in U.S.A. at Film Forum, which I had discovered was the last day this almost-never-screened film was playing in a new, restored 35mm print (I last saw this widescreen film in an atrocious, almost-unviewable, and quite incoherent and cropped 16mm print in 1988 or so). As often with Godard, whichever film of his I've seen most recently becomes not only my favorite Godard film, but one of my favorite films of all time, for a few weeks, so I'm still buzzing a bit from this one. I hope it gets a DVD release (Criterion? Please?) sometime fairly soon so I can see it again, preferably with its twin (shot, literally, at the same time), Two or Three Things I Know About Her (my FAVORITE Godard, and a film that changed EVERYTHING for me when I saw it at 17). At least as I saw it yesterday, Made in U.S.A. was a definite end to the crime-movie-loving Godard, a summary of everything he'd done in that style up to 1966 (though it almost has a sci-fi quality in being set two years in the future, in September, 1968), all mashed up and making very little sense except for cinematic sense. It is dedicated to Sam Fuller and Don Siegel, but no one, as far as I can tell, has ever noted the similarities to Siegel's 1964 remake of The Killers (here with Anna Karina in the Lee Marvin part), so I'll just say the Godard was certainly aware of the latter film.

The website The Auteurs has has a number of essays about Made in U.S.A. recently, the most recent being HERE. A good introduction to this great film.

As I said, Godard leaves me walking on air and open to all possibilities for a while after seeing his best films (especially if it's one I haven't seen in a long time), so today as I've been working and writing, I've had, once again, a mini Jean-Luc Fest in the background, with all of his films that I have a copy of (thus far, Contempt, Band of Outsiders, Alphaville, and after a break to do the Random Ten below, I'm onto Masculin-Feminine -- I may not get to the last, Tout Va Bien/Letter to Jane until much later this evening).

The Godard was followed (after dinner) by the new show from Stolen Chair Theatre Company, Theatre Is Dead and So Are You, which, I want to state immediately, was TERRIFIC and you SHOULD SEE IT. You've got one more weekend; follow the links.

It's about death, and it's very very funny, though maybe you need to be able to find the various thoughts about death both very funny and very disturbing (often at the same time) to appreciate it -- I found myself laughing a lot, but also torn and slightly upset by remembrances of human deaths I have witnessed in person or been near to, memories of the funeral home run by my grandparents and the bodies I saw there (which generally gives me a cold, dispassionate eye to mortal remains and cremains), and the increased sense of mortality that has hit me the last few years. A good mix of emotions for a show to give you, though I got the feeling that some people in the audience weren't as pleased by some of what was brought up. Whatever.

One reviewer somewhat dismissed the show as having been done before, and better, by some famous names (a dicey reason for critically dismissing anything, really; at a certain point you can dismiss anything, including masterpieces, as treading ground covered by earlier masterpieces), but what this reviewer was focusing on was far more the "frame" of the work rather than the actual content -- we are presented with an onstage wake conducted by a vaudevillian acting troupe for their fallen leader, who lies in a coffin at stage center (a coffin with many wonderful magic properties, as it turns out); a wake which fairly quickly is somewhat of a wake for Theatre itself. but once the discussion of Theatre as a dead art form is run through, we are taken to a deeper, darker level that is the real meat of the show, our feelings about Death Itself.

The cast, performing this series of acts, scenes, comedy routines, and monologues, is excellent top to bottom -- I was especially taken with Liza Wade Green, who could leap from cute and adorable to deeply creepy with just a slight change of posture and expression, and David Berent, who I know and have worked with at The Brick in his position as leader of The Maestrosities, but whom I didn't recognize at ALL here until I read his bio after the show (big change of character). But the whole group is splendid in their ability to handle both the humor and the scary stuff.

If I had any criticisms, they are that occasionally projection was a problem, especially in songs, whenever people turned away from facing downstage even a bit (the Connelly sucks up sound pretty well), and the episodic nature of the show, as a collection of acts (and I say this as someone who likes to occasionally create shows in episodes and recognizes this as a structural problem whenever you do it), means that you begin wondering more and more how many more "bits" you have to go, even if all of them are splendid, Luckily, right around the time you feel like you've had almost enough, an extended tour-de-force Romeo and Juliet sequence (with the dead body as Romeo) comes up, and is pretty obviously the penultimate section of the show when it does, so you're ready for the ending when it comes, right when it should.

Again, terrific show. Wish I could see it again, but I won't be able to for the rest of the run.

I should also mention that my old friend Michael Laurence's one-man show Krapp, 39 has re-opened, and got a great Times review today, which it richly deserves. Another one I recommend.

Today I worked on the scripts of Spacemen from Space and George Bataille's Bathrobe, which are coming together. I also now have almost completely made out lists of who I want for almost all the parts, so I can start contacting people about interest and availability if I haven't already (and SFS has wound up with a World Gone Wrong-like 21 people in the company in order to pull it off right! Whee.).

Tonight we see Stephen Heskett -- our George Amberson Minifer in The Magnificent Ambersons -- in Mike Leigh's Ecstasy at The Red Room -- it's mostly gotten great reviews, and Stephen's been singled out for praise repeatedly. Good.

Tomorrow, it's the new opera by Robert Ashley at LaMama, Made Out of Concrete. I also have a rehearsal with David Finkelstein of Lake Ivan Performance Group, who has asked me to join him in creating some improvisatory duets that he will, as he's been doing for a while, videotape and transform into experimental video pieces. Doing this kind of work is new, exciting, and scary for me, and it's affecting my acting and other art work in positive ways (always staying connected to the source of what I'm creating rather than ever treading water by letting my skill just go without grounding).

Then, Berit and I are trying to get away to Maine to relax a bit and for me to complete the scripts as much as possible. Maybe a week or a bit more.

Whew. Today's Random Ten, from 26,125 tracks in the iPod:

1. "The Lonesome River" - Bob Dylan with Ralph Stanley - The Bootleg Series, Vol. 8: Tell Tale Signs
2. "Julia" - The Beatles - The Beatles
3. "Shoot That Girl" - Hopelessly Obscure - 7" single
4. "10:30 Train" - Ugly Ducklings - Too Much, Too Soon
5. "Let Latin Commerce" - Sydney Dale - Dolce Far Niente - 27 Suave Cocktail Classics
6. "Le Grind" - Prince - The Black Album
7. "Standin' Round Crying" - Eric Clapton - From The Cradle
8. "Blue Jean" - David Bowie - Tonight
9. "Turkish Song Of The Damned" - The Pogues - If I Should Fall From Grace With God
10. "Angel" - Iggy Pop - New Values

And some kitty photos from today. Here's where Hooker's been almost all day -- as Berit says, "Being a kitty is SO tiring . . ."

Meanwhile, Moni lurks, waiting for an opportunity . . .

. . . to jump on Berit and demand attention while B is trying to play a video game (Godard film just visible to the right) . . .

. . . which the little attention-grabber gets:

And two final images, one from the terrific Lost City blog, a Woolworth counter menu from 1960:

And the sunset two nights ago from our subway stop, Kings Highway, on the Culver line, looking across Bensonhurst from Gravesend, on our way to 0109:

More soon . . .

Underneath, as WGW was really a portrait of a contemporary USA where something like the moral system of noir had taken over, so SFS is actually about anti-intellectualism in the USA, in many forms but most specifically in regard to science and scientific thought, using the Space Opera form - where all Science is cool, beautiful, misleading, and impossible - as the happy, pop-culture vessel for some deeper, angrier thoughts.

It's been fun watching and/or rewatching these old serials and movies I grew up loving -- comfort viewing -- which I often haven't seen since childhood. At the same time, as much as I love them, it is impossible to take some of the ideas in them seriously, of course. Unless, that is, you so desperately need to that you can turn off certain centers of judgment in your head. And then the trouble begins.

I've been reading some back entries on Craig Keller's Cinemasparagus site, which I've only occasionally looked at before, but will now be a regular reader of, and was struck by a paragraph and a half in his discussion of an independent film called Indigo, a fiction film about the phenomenon of the supposed "Indigo Children." It's a bit sideways to the main thrust of SFS, but it's somewhere, shall we say, in the spectrum of what I'm going for . . .

Indigo'ism is an ideology or conviction-system (keyword: system) like any other — Christianity, etc. Hence Stephen Simon's Indigo, founded on the ridiculous and assuredly outmoded principle that "the children" are innocent lambs who, withal, can point us in the direction of ego-chloroformed thought, unitchy/ants-less rolls in the grass, and Roubini-appeasing economic safeguards. Or so we'd be led to believe.

It says something about adults so adrift, and so shallow, that they experience repeated, even (let us say) post-

And the list of things to be dealt with in Spacemen from Space grows and grows and grows . . .