CollisionWorks

And the final promo of the three:




NOW PLAYING -
the second in the trio of August 2008 productions
from Gemini CollisionWorks at The Brick:


The Brick Theater, Inc.
presents
a Gemini CollisionWorks production of

Spell

a new play

written, designed and directed by Ian W. Hill
assisted by Berit Johnson

A meditation on—among other things—whether violence can ever be justified, and if so, what limits are there and where does it end?

An American woman who considers herself a patriot has committed a horrible, murderous, terrorist act on US soil as an act of protest and, she hopes, revolution against the United States Government, which she believes no longer represents the law, people, and Constitution of the USA. She finds herself in a room where she is questioned for days by a man and a woman—who may, in fact be the same person and who could be either a medical doctor or a military general. As she is interrogated, her mind, which may or may not be sane, reinterprets her surroundings into a chorus of voices—witches, revolutionaries, bossmen, old boyfriends, fragments of herself—arguing over the validity of her violent actions while at the same time trying to deny that the monstrous act has ever occurred, or that she could be capable of such a thing, and trying to reveal her beliefs while at the same time keeping her true self a deep secret.

Spell. A play for this time of many frustrating questions with no good answers. A story for those who want to want peace but have violence in their hearts. A patriotic scream. An examination of a serious mental disorder. An incantation. A length of time.

The cast of this production is
Olivia Baseman*, Fred Backus, Gavin Starr Kendall,
Samantha Mason, Iracel Rivero, Alyssa Simon*, Moira Stone*,
Liz Toft, Jeanie Tse, Rasmus Max Wirth, and Rasha Zamamiri

at
The Brick
575 Metropolitan Avenue, Williamsburg, Brooklyn 11211
½ a block from the Lorimer stop of the L Train
or Metropolitan-Grand stop of the G Train
www.bricktheater.com

August 7, 10, 20 and 24 at 8.00 pm
August 9, 23 at 4.00 pm

(ERROR ON POSTCARD ABOVE AND ELSEWHERE:
there is NO August 17 performance of Spell at 4.00 pm,
and there IS an August 9 performance at that time)

approximately 2 hours long (including one intermission)

All tickets $15.00

Tickets available at the door or through theatermania.com
(212-352-3101 or toll-free: 1-866-811-4111)

*appears courtesy of Actors Equity Association

So, Harry in Love: A Manic Vaudeville and Spell have opened and had two shows each. The third Gemini CollisionWorks show for the month of August opens the day after tomorrow. Actually tomorrow, now as I write this.

The postcards are on the way, and will be at The Brick late tomorrow or early the next day.

Here's the card and the promo announcement:




Opening TOMORROW, August 6 -
the third and final in the trio of August 2008 productions
from Gemini CollisionWorks at The Brick:

The Brick Theater, Inc.
presents
a Gemini CollisionWorks production of

Everything Must Go

a new play in dance and speeches

created by Ian W. Hill
assisted by Berit Johnson

A play in dance and fragmented businesspeak. A day in the life of 11 people working in an advertising agency as they toil on a major new automobile account, interspersed with backbiting, backstabbing, coffee breaks, office romances, motivational lectures, afternoon slumps, and a Mephistophelian boss who has his eye on a beautiful female Faust of an intern.

The day is comprised of endless awful business jargon interspersed with outbreaks of the musical-theatre inner life of the characters to a bizarre mix of musical styles and artists from the 1920s to the present.

Everything Must Go - subtitled (Invisible Republic #2) - is a constantly shifting dance-theatre piece in which anything that matters must have a price, anyone is corruptible, and everything must go.

Everything Must Go (Invisible Republic #2)
is performed and choreographed by
Gyda Arber, David Arthur Bachrach*, Becky Byers, Patrick Cann,
Maggie Cino, Tory Dube, Sarah Engelke*, Ian W. Hill,
Dina Rose*, Ariana Seigel, and Julia Sun.

at
The Brick
575 Metropolitan Avenue, Williamsburg, Brooklyn 11211
½ a block from the Lorimer stop of the L Train
or Metropolitan-Grand stop of the G Train
www.bricktheater.com

August 6, 9, 13, 15, 16, 21, and 23 at 8.00 pm
August 17 at 4.00 pm

approximately 95 minutes with no intermission

All tickets $15.00

Tickets available at the door or through theatermania.com
(212-352-3101 or toll-free: 1-866-811-4111)

*appears courtesy of Actors Equity Association

One of those early mornings where nothing seems right with the world or the work.

I hate these mornings.

Just have to get up and go about things anyway as if you were happy while feeling you're expending a lot of effort on stuff that isn't what you or anyone else wants. Woke up suddenly with the feeling of "something's wrong and I have to take care of it now." then realized it was hours before I could do anything, but couldn't get back to sleep.

I'll be better when I'm working. That's when I see how it all works. It's the in-between times that get intolerable.

I only feel sane when rehearsing or performing. The rest of the time I'm a mess. I mentioned that to the cast of Everything Must Go the other day and it was commented that this was obviously why I overcommit myself to too many projects at once - I'm just trying to fill as much time with the work that makes me feel good.

So, speaking of the work that makes everything good . . . (and ain't this a fine fine superfine way to open a post on the morning after my big BIG season of three shows has just opened at The Brick last night?)

Yup, Harry in Love opened last night. Spell opens tonight (for a "preview performance" as it is now being called).

Harry was mostly good, and where it wasn't, the house wouldn't know so much. We did it, it was rockier as it went along for reasons best left unsaid here, and we saw it could play. We had but three people in the house, however, so laughs were near nonexistent (the show needs lots of laughers to build through).

Berit and I also still think leaving the air conditioner on in the space kills humor (and Berit says it definitely does from sitting in the house during rehearsals where we've been leaving it on to practice) but we're alone in the company in that regard, so it's on and acting like a piece of wet felt placed over the show. I think you need to hear your voice slap back from the walls and ceiling to time things properly - I also think some of my current vocal problems - I've lost a lot of my voice - come from not being able to judge exactly how loud I have to scream during the screaming sections of the show, and just going full out without restraint (at the same time, I like the huskiness that has developed for Harry's voice). I've gone along with it because I am on the line about whether the audience being potentially overheated is just as bad as the sound of the AC (comedy usually plays better at around 50 degrees Fahrenheit - people are cold, but the sharpness encourages laughing, supposedly).

Six-of-one, half-a-dozen of the other, I guess.

So, it played, and okay, but not nearly as well as we could do. I wasn't at my best, but I was better than I feared I might be - I had been determined to get rest before opening no matter what, and . . . I got some, but not as much as I wanted. My lines got shakier as the show went on (why, I don't know, I've studied them all the same - actually even more for the late scenes) and I lost a few that I KNOW early in the show just from opening night nerves. And I wasn't alone, accounting for the severe ricketiness in the last scene.

But I pulled off the demanding role just fine. The other actors were often in what I think of as "opening night" mode, which I've never found a way around - everything just a little TOO intense and oversold a bit. First audiences will do that. At least, when you have an opening night like this - okay, but not in the highest percentile - you don't run the risk of what ALWAYS happens (in my shows at least) when you have a GREAT opening performance - and which I've also never found a way around - the Sophomore Slump where everyone is so overconfident with one good one under their belt they are all full of unfocused, random energy spitting everywhere that the second show becomes an energetic mess. Never found a cure for that yet. Maybe some day.

Got some photos from last night, requested for press purposes. Here, Harry steams while Wasselman gloats:

Which turns bad as Harry winds up with the only liftable chair in the room:

Later, Dr. Meyers gives "medical attention" to Paul, while Harry threatens to open Hilda's eyes by force:

And eventually, Harry carries Hilda around for some time, not believing that she wants him to kiss her:

So Berit and I spent the other night building the Harry set, which was a surprising jump for us in set terms the way Ambersons was in terms of costumes (though far less expensive).

It still wasn't fully done for last night - the trim wasn't painted, and we couldn't get the - rather bad - paintings that we acquired up in time, but that will be there on Saturday. Here are some stages of our all-night construction binge (with Berit slightly visible here and there, painting):

No, not exactly big budget - a bit high-schoolly perhaps - but needed for the show, not something we generally do, and certainly not something seen too often in The Brick (or most Indie Theatre). There's something great about standing backstage behind actual flats that gives a certain kind of theatrical rush. Really nice.

And tonight, Spell, which is stressful in that, hey, it's an original two-act play. By me. My first, really (the others have been mostly collage, which is it's own art form, so this feels different). It's less stressful in that, thankfully, I'm not acting in it. So I can deal with other things right now.

So, B& I are about to go through our day and plan out what we need to do for the show tonight.

At a time like this, I need to hear some happy music, something like this . . .

But since I don't have the dulcet tones of Xmas-a-Go-Go, I'll deal with what's coming from the iPod this morning . . .

1. "WAOG Promo" - radio spot - Rock'n'Roll - The Untold Story Vol. 6: The Jivin' Novelty Party Record
2. "Traits and Traitors" - Sky Larkin
3. "Colour of Dream" - Knights of the Road - Diggin' For Gold - Vol. 9 A Collection of Demented 60's R&B/Punk & Mesmerizing 60's Pop
4. "Mr. Woman" - Electric Six - Switzerland
5. "Snake in the Grass" - Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick & Tich - All The Hits
6. "Dumbness" - Art Objects - Bagpipe Music
7. "Sunny" - Dusty Springfield - Dusty volume 2
8. "To Be Happy Is The Real Thing" - Intruders - Save The Children
9. "Old Man" - Bari & The Breakaways - Oceanic Odyssey Volume 09
10. "Here Come the Martian Martians" - Jonathan Richman & The Modern Lovers - The Best of Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers

Now B & I have to run off and finish things for Spell tonight. There's not really a comparative lot of them, but they involve going all over the place and more work than such simple things should take. I'm worried about having to buy boots for castmembers - I'm not exactly "Mr. Clothes." of course (B & I, as we often mention, do EVERYTHING in theatre except costumes, makeup, and hair - we're at a loss on those almost completely). I also have to do the program and fix some sound/projection issues. And take down and put away the Harry set from last night.

At a time like this, I need the affection of my cats. Will Moni help . . ?

Hmmn, apparently not. Well, I can always count on my big boy Hooker for some affection when I need it . . .

That's better. And so am I. Took me three hours to write this in the background while I worked on other things and I'm feel a lot better now. Okay, back to work. That's what makes all of this worth it . . .

Once again, something told my inner workings to get me up at 6.00 am, so here I am. Five hours of sleep. Cloudy eyes and brain. At least the coffee is fresh and the milk isn't spoiled.

Spell Act II looked good last night, but needs - as actress Moira Stone pointed out when I didn't think of it - another run on its own before running the whole furshlugginer thing again - we've worked it less as it was still being written later in the process.

Also, there is one bit of writing in there, a speech of Moira's, that just won't do and must be re-written. I'm happy with everything else in the play now - various levels of happiness, but happy - but this speech just makes me cringe and shrivel up inside. It's anything I ever learned from Paddy Cheyefsky at his worst, when a character just becomes the mouthpiece for the writer - or as my friend Sean always used to say, imitating Eric Idle in Monty Python and the Holy Grail whenever a piece of drama did this, "Message coming in for you, sir!"

It's a pain, because the character really does have to make the points she's making at this moment in the play - and it's not like there isn't a "message"-quality to the whole work - and the speech drives the dialogue to a good place by the end . . . but it's just TOO much. I'll figure it out. Everything Must Go will get my attention this morning, Harry in Love this afternoon and evening, and I'll rewrite the speech late tonight or early tomorrow.

(of course now, everyone's going to look at all the other times in the play that Moira is spouting her beliefs and figure one of them is the speech I must have rewritten . . .)

Okay, I have to write some more, so let's get the Friday Random Ten done with and I can get back to that . . . here's 10 out of 26,096 in the iPod this morning:

1. "Nightclubbing" - Iggy Pop - The Idiot
2. "It's Going To Happen" - The Undertones - Life in the European Theatre
3. "Promo #1—The Luminous One #1" - Hoyt Curtain with Keye Luke - Battle of the Planets soundtrack
4. "I'm Bad Like jesse James" - John Lee Hooker - The Ultimate Collection: 1948-1990
5. "We'll Bring You Flowers" - Rabble - Rabble
6. "Spider Baby Main Title" - Ronald Stein - Not Of This Earth! The Film Music Of Ronald Stein
7. "Now Who's Good Enough" - Elite UFO - Back from the Grave 8
8. "Party Sequence" - Barry Mann & Cynthia Weill - Angel, Angel, Down We Go soundtrack
9. "I Will Go (demo)" - The Beau Brummels - San Fran Sessions (1964-66)
10. "Sticks and Stones" - Manfred Mann - The Best of the EMI Years

No new cat photos today, sorry. I can assure you, the two of them are adorable.

Oh, hey - that last song reminds me -- I'm quite pleased to discover that - once all my shows are open and there's something like personal time again - a film I've been wanting to see for over 30 years is finally becoming available on DVD next week, Peter Watkins' Privilege, from 1966 (released in the USA in '67), starring Paul Jones (lead singer of Manfred Mann, a group I've wound up becoming quite fond of in the past year, to my surprise - didn't know they were so good) and one time "it"-girl Jean Shrimpton.

I first became familiar with this film when I saw stills from it in a book about science-fiction films that I had when I was pretty small, and the images were quite striking and evocative. Later, in my early teens as I really got into The Patti Smith Group, my father pointed out that she covered "Set Me Free" from the film on the Easter album, and mentioned that - I think I'm right about this, correct me if I'm wrong, dad - one of his teachers at Philadelphia College of Art had recommended it to his students for the production design.

It's about a rising youth rebellion in England that is diverted by Them-As-Has-The-Power (primarily the Church of England) into becoming a nationalist-religious movement, with the use of an immensely popular messianic pop star as "leader." The film has had no distribution since the 60s, and Universal Pictures, which has had the rights to it, has rebuffed all attempts at release. The director's own battered 35mm print has been the only one available for occasional screenings.

So now it's on video. I saw the trailer on Amazon, and it turns out that, of course, there is another trailer and several clips on YouTube. And . . . well, it looks like something to watch alright, but it also looks a bit like a lot of the art that was innovative and happening and coming from from Swinging London in, say, 1966-67 does now - um, rather dated. A particular whiff of the English documentary/kitchen sink/angry young man-style (which was already being viciously parodied by SCTV in the late 70s in "Look Back in a Bloody Rage") comes through, the whole Ken Loach/Mike Leigh thing (the Brits are my favorite filmmakers when they go all stylized and perverse - Nic Roeg, Ken Russell, Michael Powell, Peter Greenaway, Dennis Potter, Alex Cox, hell, Alfred Hitchcock for that matter - but they always wind up getting shoved aside for the ever-faithful kitchen-sink drama tradition over there).

Well, I still want to see it - it looks like a cross between the realistic and stylized English film traditions, and it's been many MANY years of dreaming about it.

Here's six related videos from YouTube, inside the cut:

( And did those feet, in ancient times, walk upon England's mountains green? )

Okay, off to solve writing issues . . .

I know I'm started off with this before, but . . .

I am tired, I am weary, I could sleep for a thousand years . . .

Except, apparently, I can't. As, even with an alarm set to get me up at 8.00 am (6 1/2 hours sleep), my body decided that 6.00 am and 4.5 hours was enough. Why, I don't know. My brain does not agree. Neither does my upset stomach.

So, here I am, drinking microwaved leftover coffee from yesterday - massively over-sweetened with Splenda to make up for the lack of milk, as the carton in the fridge has turned (which accounts for the leftover coffee from yesterday, when I discovered the spoilage after two or three sips) - and wishing my body had let me have those extra two hours.

The shows proceed and take up almost every moment of our waking hours (sorry for no communication, family & friends).

We're behind in some things and on top of others. Generally ahead of where we've been on most of our shows this past two years at this point, but more behind in other ways.

I'm still writing Everything Must Go for chrissakes, which opens in two weeks (of course, I also just finished writing Spell two days ago which opens in a week and a day). Most of what is supposed to be my writing time has been taken up with jobs I wasn't supposed to have to do, like recasting difficult roles at the last minute. I had five full days of show work ruined in the casting search for someone to take over a role in Spell. After my last note on the subject, I got someone, who came in, did great, took the part, came to one rehearsal, and also (like the original actor) got another (well-paying) job, he says. This really didn't help anything.

However, we finally got someone - Rasmus Max Wirth, and thanks again Max - and he joined us last night and we did a stumble-run of Act I of Spell that made me very very happy indeed. Yes, "Act I" - what was supposed to be a one-act of 90 minutes has become two acts, about 50 and 45 minutes, respectively, with an intermission - the cast really pushed for this, over my objections, but after a really good way to end "Act I" appeared in rehearsal the other night I was sold. So this is my first original two-act play. I like it. I was unsure for a day or two there if I was happy with the play itself, but after the last couple of runs I'm happy.

The first full one on Monday showed me where I had to cut and rewrite things (big discussion with the cast afterward about what works for them and what doesn't - some of the "doesn't" being things that were wonky as a viewer and which I have changed, and some of them being things that were terrific from the house and I just have to get that across to the company).

Last night's half-run made me a lot more confident in my work - Berit and I were sneaking pleased glances through a lot of it at each other. We'll see how Act II fares tonight.

Everything Must Go need to have its "book" finished, but the musical numbers are all coming into shape nicely. Two nights ago I tackled one of the "harder" numbers and it came together much differently (and better) than I imagined. Sunday we have a long rehearsal by which time we'll have the full script (I swear) and can finish the whole damn show - then we actually have some extra time to put the thing together, comparatively.

Harry in Love hasn't been touched in days and was fine when I left it. Tomorrow we do a full runthrough. Everyone else has been pretty much off-book. I am now 90% there, so I'm taking the whole of tomorrow, daytime, to get 100%. I'd like to be writing, but that will have to wait until the evening.

Today is to be taken up with a drive out to the warehouse of Materials for the Arts in Long Island City, and Berit and I grabbing whatever we may find that will serve us for the shows, so we don't have to buy or build EVERYTHING. Of course, the weather is crappy (though better now than when I awoke), so loading and unloading lots of stuff from there and at The Brick will be FUN. Then I meet an actress from Everything Must Go to catch her up on the choreography she missed from missing a few rehearsals. Then more Spell tonight.

Update interlude over. Back to writing. More tomorrow with pictures and random iPod ten . . .

Damn, but I'm tired, and there's work to do.

Though writing work is not as difficult as some when tired.

This weekend, rehearsing and writing, writing and rehearsing. Shows look good. We did a runthrough of Harry in Love on Saturday that was damned good. Three of the six of us in the cast are off-book and only rarely needed prompts. Another was off-book for all but one scene, and the other two (which included me) seem to know most of the lines but still need the script as a security blanket. Rhythms good. Show ran 2 hours 17 minutes including 10-minute intermission. I think 5-8 minutes will come off that (some of the company think more will, but we're actually already pretty well bookin', even with some of us still looking at scripts).

Worked two scenes from Harry again yesterday, and got them to a really great manic level. We all felt really good about them when we were finished, kinda looking around for a moment after the run of the last scene like, "Damn, we did that RIGHT." It was interesting, because we actually weren't as precise as we need to be, but we got to a level of energy and character and rhythm that was dead on. So, we now need the precision of lines (in particular) on top of that.

Spell also continues. Still behind in script (on that and Everything Must Go), but there was enough to work in rehearsal yesterday (including working in new cast member Samantha Mason). Next rehearsal for Spell is Friday and I expect to have the full script done before that (two weeks before we open, nice way to cut it close, Hill). Tomorrow, back to Everything Must Go after a bit off (with the way the casts' schedules are working this month, that's how it goes - three or four days mainly on one show and then it goes away for a week or so).

Spell looking good, but some of what I planned didn't work and I had to come up with okay solutions. I like the show, but it's definitely not the show I had in my head while writing, and writing gets harder as I try to figure out if I'm writing the show that was in my head or the show that's appearing in rehearsals now (which is better, I think, but hard to get a grip on). Also, we've lost another cast member, and one even harder to recast due to specialized abilities and qualities needed. We're workin' on it.

So, I have to get back to the writing of the shows now, but first, a bit of fun - I have a backlog of stuff to share. Here's some album covers from LP Cover Lover that I dug:

And inside the cut, NINE recent found videos of amusement for your dining and dancing pleasure:

( Read more... )

Enjoy.

Writing on Spell for a good deal yesterday - not as much of a good deal as I'd like, as I stopped to handle some publicity matters for the shows - sending out press releases for Spell and some additional ones for Harry in Love that I'd missed in the first go-round the day before - and that took up several hours, actually. Well, now at least most media outlets in the tri-state area have been informed about these shows. Have to finish them now and make them something worth watching.

I did get four scenes pretty much done and bits of another in there. Spell is made up of 32 scenes and 10 of them still have to be written pretty much in full and another 4 are fragmentary right now. I should be able to get 7-9 scenes done today. I hope. I think I have all the material for those sitting ready in my head now.

And I also have many many pages of research - primarily on Palestine, Cuba, and the Peoples' Republic of China, but also on the history and variants of the Pandora's Box myth and the history of Witches and Witchcraft. I spent a LONG time last night - a couple hours - reformatting a complete copy of Mao's Little Red Book from where I got it online into a usable work copy in Word, as I had to find the quotes I could use, and note where they fell in the book so I could find the original language versions in another online database and copy those (as images) to put in the script so Jeanie Tse can speak them in the show. And still hope that I've correctly picked out the Chinese for the quote I want . . .

Whew.

Well, at least I realized and accepted the extent to which I can actually go into all of these issues in the show, which has helped reduce 100 dense pages of single-spaced research material to 10 spaced-out pages of Material That Is Useful To Make Art Out Of. This has helped speed things up.

And I have to get back to Everything Must Go, but I have more Spell rehearsals before EMG and more time to write for EMG before I see that cast again.

And as I write this, off in the iPod, from out of 26,131 tracks:

1. "Yes, The River Knows" - The Doors - Waiting For The Sun
2. "Go Away" - The Underworld - Nightmares From the Underworld vol. 1
3. "Monkey See, Monkey Do" - Sam the Sham & The Pharaohs - Pharaohization!
4. "Velvet Goldmine" - David Bowie - The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and The Spiders from Mars
5. "Sometime In The Morning" - The Monkees - Anthology
6. "Portland Town" - The Belfast Gypsies - Moxie Presents The Garage Zone volume 1
7. "I See The Light" - The Five Americans - Nuggets: Original Artyfacts From The First Psychedelic Era, Vol. 2
8. "Let's Dance" - The Invaders - Garagepunk: Flip, Flops & Fly By Nighters
9. "Have I The Right" - The Honeycombs - It's Hard To Believe It: The Amazing World Of Joe Meek
10. "Lines In The Sand" - Randy Newman - Guilty: 30 Years Of Randy Newman: Odds & Ends

(huh - the iPod decided it was going to have a Fun With Farfisas Day, for the most part . . .)

And I do have some new kitty photos from this week, though before Hooker's little problem of the last few days.

It appears he's scratched his cornea - we're not sure, but we think we can see it, and he DEFINITELY has an irritated eye. The inner eyelid is swollen and the eye waters quite a lot. I had a scratched cornea once (from, of course, a cat running across my face with her claws out) about 15 years ago, and as I recall, there isn't much that is done - I had an eyepatch for a couple of weeks and had to put fake tears in it from time to time until it just healed on its own. Hooker's eye looked bad two days ago, then started looking to be quickly healing, and looked perfectly normal for most of yesterday, then suddenly was back to looking crappy last night - maybe he did something to irritate it again or something.

In any case, once it's time, I'll call the vet and see if I can take him in today - another distraction from writing! - and find out what can be done. Berit had to laugh, looking at our little boy last night, with his cauliflower ear and deflicted eye (as Unca Frankie would put it), saying that for a pampered apartment cat he sure can look like a street tom who's been in a few scrapes.

Well, here he is, a few days ago, looking like he just wants to be left alone . . .

And here with Moni, happy . . .

Okay, time to check in on the online bag, call the vet, and get back to work . . .

The three shows proceed.

Harry in Love is rehearsing very smoothly, which is to be expected for this already fully-written, cut, cast well, traditional comedy. The biggest hangup I've had was when I had to go over an incredibly tiny moment over and over last night - it's a gag I love and the timing needed to be ABSOLUTELY PERFECT for it to work at all.

The structure of the moment is that two people are yelling at each other heatedly and a third suddenly comes out with a pertinent but unexpected piece of information - there needs to be a brief beat of silence, and then the other three people in the room look at the person who's suddenly spoken up. So the brief beat and the look have to be timed just right, and, even more importantly, fall together with one "bump" like a period, to make the laugh work. It was getting the bump right - if anyone's movement trailed off rather than just fell into place, the moment didn't work, and it took a while to get everyone on the same page with the movement - if Ken Simon (the person I'm yelling with in the scene) made a double gesture (arm, then head) it didn't work (arm and head together worked); if Tom Reid, the person interrupting us, moved his head around, looking at us, during the beat and look to him, it didn't work.

So about 10 or 12 minutes were spent on this tiny moment, which seems like a lot, but then 10 minutes of play can go by in rehearsal without me needing to fix anything, so it all works out - there's a very specific rhythm to the play, a comic give and take that resembles, at various points, the timing of Abbott & Costello, Laurel & Hardy, Edgar Kennedy with Harpo & Chico Marx in Duck Soup, and Zero Mostel & Gene Wilder in the second scene of The Producers. So when we all get the groove going and get that rhythm, the play really takes care of itself. But we have to get that groove, which gets easier and easier the more we do it.

Spell and Everything Must Go are okay except I need to finish the scripts, dammit, which is proving much harder than expected. I keep saying that, and then I have a day where everything just COMES to me on one script or the other, for one scene or another, and I think, "Now I'm on a ROLL!" And then I finish that bit and the next one . . . doesn't happen. I have a schedule of pages set for myself now which, if I can stick to it, will have Spell done before this coming Sunday's rehearsal and EMG before next Tuesday's. I have some new pieces of Spell for tonight, luckily, but not as much as I'd like.

I also had to recast a role in each show (besides the recent addition of Tory to EMG), so Samantha Mason is now in Spell and Sarah Engelke is now in EMG, which are good additions to the groups.

Spell looks good and I feel good about it, as long as I can keep the writing at the same quality I've had. Still, it's a bigger work than I imagined - I guess wider is the more appropriate term; it's about more than I thought, and as comments/thoughts come in from this very smart and thoughtful cast, I have to deal with the issues that are raised, which is daunting and the writing problem at this point. And I've been putting off the six hardest scenes for last (out of 32 scenes in the play), hoping I can get a better intellectual grip on the material I have to deal with before setting them down (in brief, Cuba, Palestine, the Peoples' Republic of China).

I think there's a good reason I've never dealt with serious political material in my work before except on the very metaphoric level. In the past I've always said of political art that generally that I wasn't fond of it because generally it meant that either the politics or the art suffered from being combined with the other. And I'd rather see great art with shallow politics than the other way around (there is SO much lousy art whose politics I agree with, but that is SO annoying - I hate hearing something like my own point-of-view being espoused by Bad Art). It has been this current Administration of the USA that has made me feel I had to say SOMETHING about this country in my work (leading to World Gone Wrong, That's What We're Here For, and the staging of my versions of Hamlet and Foreman's Symphony of Rats).

So . . . {sigh} . . . maybe the trick is to just let go of the idea of dealing with some of this in Spell at the level I've been getting to in my head. Just letting the Art go where it needs to and use the material within it, not force the play to take in more than it wants to.

Everything Must Go doesn't worry me as much as it did briefly. I had a momentary loss-of-faith in my abilities for this one, but got over it. Great rehearsal the other night, in which two dance sequences came together - one to "Slug" by Passengers, the other to "Handsome Man" by Barbara Pittman. Really nice, and I'm VERY happy with them. I think I got to the point of figuring out how to work with the dancers of the company and choreograph in collaboration with them, and use their varied abilities and styles.

Unfortunately, during the rehearsal at Champions Studios, big clumsy me, working with my shoes off, kicked a radiator nice and hard, resulting in my right little toe turning several rather spectacular shades of purple - which has continued for two days now, with pain that comes and goes in odd ways (sometimes just the toe hurts if I put pressure on it, sometimes that's fine but it hurts if I curl it, sometimes there's no specific pain in the toe but the whole front of the foot aches).

In this cut, a picture of my toe as it was last night - I'd generally not hide this, but maybe some people don't want to see my injured, mottled toe . . .

( Maybe I'll Do a Photo a Day and Show the Progress . . . )

In the other world, the great film collagist and eccentric Bruce Conner has died at the age of 74. I was going to link to a whole bunch of videos of his work, but the fine fine superfine folks at Movie City Indie have already handled that better than I could, doing two wonderful posts about Conner HERE and HERE.

Excellent postings, those, and the first contains eight of Conner's films embedded in it, including his landmark A Movie (1958) and his videos for Byrne & Eno's "America Is Waiting" and Devo's "Mongoloid" - and a surprising collaboration with Toni Basil (or "Antonia Christina Basilotta" as she's credited here), "Breakaway," which features original footage of Basil dancing (most of Conner's work is made up of found footage) that gets into some NSFW territory (oh, just saw it's from 1966! so this was immediately post-Village of the Giants and pre-Head for Basil . . .).

Worth watching, all those films - though I can't say I've gotten through all of them yet myself. And here's A Movie inside a cut, as I'd like to have this handy and give you a taste of Conner's work, right here and now . . .

( A MOVIE by Bruce Conner )

Now I have to get back to not only my writing of the shows, but getting out the next section of press releases for them, which takes time as well. I also have to deal today with finishing up some business with The Costume Collection and separate matters with Fractured Atlas. And Berit and I need to have a proper sit-down about the postcard designs for the three shows and making up prop/set/costume/sound/special lights/projection lists of what we will need for each show.

Just a couple of weeks of GETTING STUFF DONE every waking moment, and it'll all be fine . . .

Just finally got through cleaning up all of the best shots from last August's production of Necropolis 0: Kiss Me Succubus.

This was my dubbed live theatre tribute to the 1960s films of Radley Metzger, Jean Rollin, Jesse Franco, and Mario Bava.

These shots feature me (as The Decadent Man), Alyssa Simon (His Wife), Jody Christopherson (His Mistress), Peter Handy (His American Friend), Stacia French (The Countess, a Succubus), Patrick Cann (Her Manservant), Jessica Savage (Her Protege, The Venus in Furs), and Douglas Scott Sorenson (The Incubus).

There's 20 of them, so I'll put them behind a cut . . .

( Where did you find her? / In the most incredible place - Lisbon! )

And now, Berit is insisting it's time again to pluck my eyebrows, and she's waiting for me with the tweezers . . . oh, BOY.

So, besides listening to songs titled after this day by X, Dave Alvin (well, the same song as the X one, in very different versions) and The Beach Boys, what else is there to do?

Well, I plan to spend most of it here indoors at home writing sections of my two plays that open in August.

One, Everything Must Go (Invisible Republic #2) is a follow up to Invisible Republic #1: That's What We're Here For (an american pageant), which was a look at how things may have not quite gone the way they should in the USA post-WWII, done as a trade-show patriotic revue. This new one is a dance-movement-speech-piece detailing a day in the life of an advertising agency, ultimately about selling and a country where everything has a price and the intrinsic value of anything is only equal to its market price.

The other show, Spell, is a cheery piece about a woman who regards herself an American patriot and has committed a terrible, murderous crime in, as she sees it, an act of revolution against a USA government that has become illegal and un-Constitutional and must be overthrown - she'd prefer a new Constitutional Convention, but feels that's even less likely than armed revolution.

So, appropriate work for this gloomy patriotic day, with the thunderheads coming in.

As should be noted and read this day, here are the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States of America.

Sheila O'Malley over at The Sheila Variations is always good for posts on American History, and I'm sure she'll have more today - she's already posted yesterday on John Adams' letter to Abigail Adams, July 3, 1776, and today on July 4, 1826 (the day on which John Adams and Thomas Jefferson both died).

In non-patriotic but glorious news for film buffs, a NEARLY-complete print of Fritz Lang's Metropolis has been FOUND! Over a quarter of the original cut of the film has been assumed lost forever for years, and now about 85% of that quarter has appeared in a newly discovered print.

The story is at GreenCine Daily.

In any case, no new cat pictures today, unfortunately, but along with the Friday Random Ten, I'll do another music-geek meme that appeared in a couple of blogs I read today:

Post a List of Your Favorite Albums of Every Year from the Year You Were Born to the Present.

Never thought of this list before, and I'm as list crazy as most music geeks (see: High Fidelity), so here's 40 years of the albums I prefer, behind a cut, because that's a long-enough list to want to hide (and I'm sure more than a few of you won't give a damn anyway). I list some runners-up as well, because it was nearly impossible to choose in some years - and there are plenty of top albums for me that aren't here, the "runners-up" are just for time when I really had to sit and choose between albums for the top spot. I also chose to limit this to "pop music" albums, so as not to wind up having to decide if I wanted to throw Einstein on the Beach or various albums by The Firesign Theatre into my mental competition.

( 40+ Albums of Some Quality )

Damn. If I'd have known how long making that list was going to take, I wouldn't have bothered starting . . . that took forEVER!

And back in the iPod, here's a Random 10 out of 26,130 tracks:

1. "Down In The Valley" - Johnny Cash - Legend
2. "Garner State Park Concert Spot - Houston TX" - radio promo, late '60s
3. "Big Business" - David Byrne - The Catherine Wheel
4. "This Land Is Your Land" - Mojo Nixon & Skid Roper - Root Hog or Die!
5. "Gonna Leave You Baby" - Sammy Lewis/Willie Johnson Combo - Sun Records: The Blues Years 1950-1958 vol. 8
6. "Next In Line" - Johnny Cash - From the Vaults vol. 2
7. "You Can't Take It Away" - Tawney Reed - Backcombing
8. "New Special Squad" - Guido & Maruizio De Angelis - Beretta 70—Roaring Themes from Thrilling Italian Police Films
9. "Vacation in the Mountains" - The Cleftones - For Sentimental Reasons
10. "Girl in Tears" - Phluph - Phluph

Have a good 4th, friends . . . I'm now off, as always on this day, to watch 1776 again . . .