CollisionWorks

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 . . .

I have been reading stories about the (what would seem to be unquestioned) murder of Private First Class LaVena Johnson, whose mutilated body was returned from Iraq to her family as a "suicide," according to the U.S. Army.

There is a good brief overview with links to other stories HERE at Jezebel. I don't personally want to say any more about this, just please read. I can't stand to do so anymore.

I am hoping that her father, Dr. John Johnson, is actually able to make good on his comment to the Army coroner - "Somebody murdered my daughter and you picked the wrong person to fuck with." - but I fear the whole thing will be just vanished like so much else (like say, the medical records dealing with an operation performed by the Army on someone I know well, which was botched and nearly killed him, and which has been apparently made to have "never happened," as far as the Army is concerned, last I heard).

Sometimes I really do wish I could believe in karmic retribution, but I can't and I don't, and we have to do all we can to make these things as right as we can ourselves, and now.

Sorry for the downer. It's the world we're in.

So, more of the same.

Good work happening on Spell and Harry in Love - need to get back to Everything Must Go, and need to arrange more rehearsals for that show. Lost an actress from EMG, but she's actively helping in finding someone to replace her. Still asking people to replace the actress in Spell who left us - no one's bit yet.

Script for Spell coming along fine. Need to get back to more work on EMG. Monday will be the next big writing day - really busy this weekend on other things. And today, for that matter.

So here's 10 out of 26,041 this morning from the now far-too-packed iPod (I need to do another big cleanout of tracks here):

1. "Playera" - Sid Bass - Rato's Nostalgia Collection 6
2. "Ditch" - The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion - Orange
3. "The Book of Love" - The Monotones - The Doo Wop Box I vol 3: Doo Wop's Golden Age (1957-1959)
4. "Weep No More" - Terry & Tyrants - Lost Deep Soul Treasures 2
5. "Memphis Soul Stew" - King Curtis - The Most Legendary Soul
6. "Doctor Mind (single mix)" - Phluph - Phluph
7. "Joousamamonogatari (Queen medley in a Southeast Asian language)" - Joousama - UsamJoousama Monogatari
8. "I Want Your Love Tonight" - The Hearts - A Million Dollars Worth of Girl Groups Volume 3
9. "Welcome Plastics" - Plastics - Welcome Plastics
10. "I'm Glad" - Captain Beefheart & The Magic Band - Safe As Milk

Meanwhile, back with the kitties, Moni kept trying to help me write Spell last night - it didn't work out too well, but maybe I'll find a place or two for her to insert a line or something . . .

And I can only post a photo this unflattering of me because Hooker's so cute in it -- me passed out on the couch a few nights ago, with Hooker in a favorite place for him to crash:

And one last shot, like the others, oddly, set on our couch, of the two of them just chillin':

Okay, off to print up scripts . . .

Yesterday at rehearsal, I was trying to demonstrate to Ken Simon the kind of tune I wanted him to be singing an aimless improvised song to, and what came out of my mouth was a bit from George Carlin, in which he demonstrated how while you weren't allowed to sing at the dinner table, you could stand next to the table and sing yer ass off . . .

I'm STAND-in' at the TA-ble . . .

This got into a brief Carlin discussion, and Ken said that Carlin's 2008 HBO special had been a step up from his previous one. I'm watching (or more precisely, as I have this window open on top of it, listening) to it now, and he celebrated being 70 in style all right.

And now he's gone. I'll miss not having any new Carlin material, but there's plenty of old material still to go over. PLENTY. My mom had Carlin's first seven albums or so in the house while I was growing up ("or so" because she was missing one - luckily it was the subpar Toledo Window Box), and I learned a helluva lot about life and language from them, I can assure you. And I still can't use more than one of the "seven dirty words" in a row without hearing the full list, spoken in Carlin's distinctive cadences.

I was going to embed some video playlists of his first and most recent specials, but the videos, while still up at YouTube, have suddenly become un-embeddable. But you can still link to the playlists.

So HERE is Carlin in 1977 (I dig the introduction from Shana Alexander needed by HBO in those times to "explain" Carlin's vulgar language from a "serious, historical, satirical" perspective, hah!)

And HERE he is in 2008 (I'm going to have to play this for Berit later - it sounds like one of our conversations in funnier monologue form, with all of the same pet peeves, or rather, as Carlin said, "I don't have pet peeves, I have major psychotic hatreds").

The person who posted these specials has posted a LOT of Carlin, which I can't embed, but which can be found HERE, including GC's best albums from the 1970s.

Damn, I'll miss the man.

Here I am, still in Maine - took longer to deal with the car inspection than I figured, they had to order parts - about to drive off in an hour or so, but I might as well get the Random Ten for the day done. Won't be able to do any cat stuff until much later - probably tomorrow.

Unfortunately, I left my nice headphones back in Brooklyn, so I have to listen on some old ones I found lying around in Mom's house, which are incredibly tinny and make everything sound like I'm listening to everything with my ear up against an old AM mono transistor radio.

Which is not necessarily a bad thing - I know that the finest recording studios used to keep (maybe still do) a crappy mono car or radio speaker patched into the board to pump mixes through, the idea being that a song should be able to sound great on the best and worst audio delivery systems. In practice, I've found this to be more true than not.

So here's ten from 25,559 in the iPod, tinny and reduced:

1. "See You in the Boneyard" - The Flesh Eaters - A Minute To Pray A Second To Die
2. "The Riddler" - Frank Gorshin - 7" single
3. "Space Monkey" - Patti Smith Group - Easter
4. "Chills & Fever - The Serfmen - Garage Punk Unknowns vol. 8
5. "Willie Moore" - Richard Burnett & Leon Rutherford - Anthology of American Folk Music, volume 1: Ballads
6. "RIP" - Alien Sex Fiend - Return of the Batcave volume 1
7. "Guess Things Happen This Way" - Johnny Cash - Best of Sun Records Volume One
8. "Bull Dog" - The Shangri-Las - Myrmidons of Melodrama
9. "Before You Accuse Me" - Bo Diddley - The Chess Box
10. "Let's Twist Again" - Chubby Checker - Beat of the Pops 01

Yup, all sounded good in the crappy headphones. Of course it makes sense for all the pre-1970s singles up there - 7 out of the 10.

Got some good writing done on Spell while up here. More work needed on Everything Must Go - Berit sent me some notes of things that had gone on at the last work session for EMG that would have helped me get some work done, but I got them too late one evening to get to work on it, and by that point I was on a roll with Spell and didn't want to break it.

The more I research some of the political history that has to go into Spell the more I am daunted by trying to deal with it all - trying to sum up sides of massive, decades- (or centuries-) old arguments in a few minutes of conversation that's meant to serve the play in other ways anyway. I'll find it - I was just starting to - but research leads to more research more often than it leads to solutional writing.

I'll crack it. Just . . . daunting . . . right now.

It is the 104th Bloomsday, as such things are counted. For a fine fine superfine look at Joyce's Ulysses and the reasons it is set on June 16, 1904, check in with the foine foine superfoine Ms. O'Malley HEREIN.

It is also my 40th birthday.

If you want to be precise as to time and all, it's about another hour or so as I write this (which is when I will be expecting the yearly call from Mom, who remembers the minute quite well).

Thanks to all who have sent cards and gifts, real and virtual.

I had various plans for today that have not panned out - first, there was to be a party, but that proved too complicated and tiring to deal with immediately post-Ambersons; then I was going to get away from the city for a few days and relax and write for the August shows that need it, but the car is in the shop and by the time it's out, even if it's today, there's no point in going anymore; then B & I thought of having one of our private birthday times together (usually done for her) where we go down to Coney Island and play a lot of Skee-Ball and drink pina coladas and eat at Nathan's and maybe go on a ride or two that scare the hell out of us and we regret immensely, but a look out the window combined with the weather forecast makes this unlikely (and very glad we didn't have the party, too).

Now, I'm thinking of spending the day dealing with the DMV, as my driver's license expires today (one of the reasons I was going to Maine, to renew it there). Unfortunately, I've checked their website and discovered that they apparently absolutely require a piece of ID I haven't seen in years (my Social Security card), so I may be screwed on this. A fine birthday this is.

So, I'm 40. Better, as they say, than the alternative, but still odd. Not the 40 I expected for at least the first three decades of my life, but all good, all fine, OK, OK, really. So, it'll be just another day on earth today - I'll be bored, I'll nap, I'll wait to hear about the car, I'll maybe get some writing done. Maybe we'll have a nicer dinner than usual. Oh, I have a wrapped present sitting around from my in-laws-to-be waiting to be opened, that's right - well, that's a nice birthday-kinda thing to do.

Not exactly a powerhouse day in history for events and birthdays, this one - though Bloomsday ain't too bad and I've always enjoyed that connection (right, I have to read some Joyce today, that's a ritual I never miss). Let's see . . .

I share this birthday with Adam Smith, Geronimo, King Gustav V of Sweden, Stan Laurel, Arthur Pierson, Ona Munson, Murray Leinster, Helen Traubel, Jack Albertson, Ilona Massey, Enoch Powell, Anthony Sharp, Katherine Graham, Irving Penn, Faith Domergue, Bebe Barron, Vilmos Zsigmond, Bill Cobbs, Ondine, Jim Dine, Erich Segal, Joyce Carol Oates, Lamont Dozier, Joan Van Ark, Roberto Duran, Gino Vannelli, Laurie Metcalf, Ian Buchanan, Arnold Vosloo, Adrienne Shelly, Jenny Shimizu, Tupac Shakur, and Tom Lenk - who are all the people I've ever heard of from the various lists I've seen.

Them! was released on this day in 1954, and Psycho in 1960. The Monterey Pop Festival opened on this day in 1967.

In the Catholic Church, it is the feast day of St. Benno, the patron saint of anglers, weavers, and alliteration, St. John Regis, the patron saint of lacemakers, and St. Lutgardis, patron saint of childbirth and the handicapped.

Also on this day: In 1858, Abe Lincoln delivered the "house divided" speech; 1903, the Ford Motor Company was incorporated; in 1933, FDR opened the New Deal program; 1961, Rudolph Nureyev defects; and in 1963, the USSR launched the first woman in space.

Whaddya know, Mom didn't call at 10.45 am (probably thinks I'm sleeping in today, when I haven't been able to sleep past 6.30 am in weeks). Ah, well, back to figuring out what to do with the day . . .

( A VERY Limited View of Me in Pictures, skewed massively to the last few years: )

Well, the car is fixed, and maybe I'll drive up to Maine anyway, just to have something to do . . .