Finally got this uploaded . . .

At The Brick's 5th Anniversary party, back in December, Berit and I did a little live performance piece accompanied by a video playing behind us.

The stage was covered with sixteen chairs, evenly spaced in three rows facing the audience (5/6/5). As each of our pre-recorded voices alternated on the video, we would take turns slowly walking around the stage -- each of us ending our little segment by knocking over a chair, one-by-one, until at last the stage was covered with overturned chairs (some had been carefully tipped, some knocked, a couple thrown, and one smashed over and over into the ground and destroyed) and the two of us wound up facing each other over the last chair, which was not overturned, as the lights faded (we had created the light cues in the computer board so that Berit could start the DVD of the video and hit the go button on the light board 5 seconds later - then run down the ladder from the booth and to the stage to perform the piece - and the lights and video would sync up).

It was designed and intended completely as a live video/performance combo, so the video doesn't exactly work on its own (it's basically a slideshow of text with voiceovers), but I'm happy enough with it to share it with you. It was much liked by a number of people there (who might not want me to say so in public), and got a little heckling afterward as well ("More facile statements!").

I created the soundtrack and designed the overall piece. Berit created the text slides (from my design suggestion of copying Godard/Gorin's titles in Tout Va Bien) and put the whole thing together as a movie.

Here it is behind the cut. It's close to 11 minutes long.

( Where Do You Stand? )

Enjoy.

First reading of The Magnificent Ambersons by Orson Welles: A Reconstruction for the Stage on Saturday (nice full title, huh? well, I'm trying to be accurate). Went very well. As always, not all good actors are great readers, so it goes, and some actors just got the parts out of the gate, while some will need some more directorial attention before the characters are there. I played the full Herrmann score behind the appropriate scenes, and it sounded lovely.

We talked a bit after the reading about what was done to Welles' original 131-minute cut (which we'd basically just read the transcript of) to turn it into the 88-minute release version - I think the cast was a bit horrified to hear the details, including how it went from being planned as RKO's big 1942 Easter release, premiering in Radio City Music Hall, to winding up instead snuck-out on a double bill in June, 1942 with Mexican Spitfire Sees a Ghost (and an email this morning from actor Bill Weeden, who's playing Major Amberson, informs me that Ambersons was the bottom half of the double-bill, supporting the Lupe Velez vehicle!).

I was then asked by cast members about when was I going to stage the restored director's cut version of Mexican Spitfire Sees a Ghost? Now I want to get my hands on a copy of that film so I can use excerpts from it for either our pre-or postshow ("We hope you enjoyed The Magnificent Ambersons, please remain seated for our main feature, Mexican Spitfire Sees a Ghost, starring Lupe Velez!"). Unfortunately, the Mexican Spitfire series remains woefully unreleased on home video, though Mr. Weeden notes all the films were shown on TCM but a few weeks ago, so maybe they'll show up again - if anyone sees them coming, let me know . . .

Berit and I saw Notes from Underground at The Brick on Saturday night (it was great) and hung out for some time afterwards. We were getting ready to go when a brief question from Moira Stone's mother, Myrna, on what my next project was wound up starting me off on probably something like a 45-minute lecture on Welles, as I can be wont to do (I hope I didn't bore her too much, but she seemed interested and kept asking the questions that kept me going).

Hm. Every now and then it strikes me, with a strange mix of pride, embarrassment, and seething anger, that I know and can expound upon a ridiculous number of useless things accurately and fully. I'm fairly sure that if it was suddenly demanded of me, I could probably deliver a three-hour lecture on the life and work of Orson Welles off the top of my head, with great accuracy, attention to detail, and a fine number of interesting anecdotes and facts, including a few that only I seem to know or have figured out.

(Okay, for example? There's a brief shot of a fake octopus in the newsreel at the start of Citizen Kane. This is THE SAME fake octopus that Ed Wood used, badly, in his film Bride of the Monster. It also showed up in the John Wayne film Wake of the Red Witch, and I've read separately about the Kane/Red Witch and Bride/Red Witch connections, but nobody else seems to have caught the Ed Wood/Orson Welles link here otherwise. Or, probably, cares about it.)

I know enough about Welles (and other film/music subjects, but Welles is a good example) that I can't now read much on the subject without getting irritated that I know more than the writer does. I tried to listen to both the Roger Ebert and Peter Bogdanovich commentaries on the Citizen Kane DVD when it came out, but had to shut both off after 10-15 minutes when I got fed up with the factual inaccuracies both of them were spitting out -- Ebert in particular lost a lost of respect from me when he points to Joseph Cotten in the group of people in the screening room near the beginning and says "There's Alan Ladd as a bit player in one of his first films" (!!!). It's JOE COTTEN, for crissakes! The more interesting story is how this scene was the first filmed scene for Kane (in an actual RKO screening room; wonder if it still exists on the Paramount lot?), done as a supposed "test" before actual filming was to begin (at Gregg Toland's suggestion), and that's why you have actors in there from Welles' Mercury Players who also play other characters in the the film (besides Cotten, you can see Erskine Sanford in there, and supposedly writer Herman J. Mankewicz is in the group, too).

(Alan Ladd is the reporter with the pipe talking to Thompson at the end in Xanadu -- another fun fact: the reporter interviewing Kane in the first dialogue scene in the film - in the newsreel - is cinematographer Gregg Toland himself, which makes for a nice in-joke as Welles, onscreen as elderly Kane, keeps talking down to his offscreen mentor as "young fella")

Somehow it seems like I should be able to make a living from knowing all this crap. When I know more about Citizen Kane than Roger Ebert and Peter Freakin Bogdanovich?

Well, in any case, it's useful as long as it feeds my own work in some way, which it does.

So anyway, going through Wellesmania as I work on Ambersons has led to a couple of YouTube finds which I share below the cut here.

First is his 90-minute documentary Filming Othello. Well, not exactly a documentary . . . as Welles put it:

With F For Fake, I thought I had discovered a new kind of movie, and it was the kind of movie I wanted to spend the rest of my life doing. The failure of F For Fake, in America and also in England, was one of the big shocks of my life. I really thought I was onto something. As a form, [F For Fake] is a personal essay film, as opposed to a documentary. It's quite different -- it's not a documentary at all.

This film, Welles' last completed one, was created for German television as a companion to a showing of his film of Othello. I first (and last, until right now) saw it at the original Film Forum down on Watts Street in February of 1987 (somewhere there's an embarrassing cassette tape recorded by friend and roommate Sean Rockoff of me coming home from the screening and raving about the film to him, getting drunker and drunker on a bottle of peppermint schnapps as I do so - hey, I was 18, man!). I've been talking up this film to people for years, and have been extremely frustrated that since that screening it seems to have vanished from all outlets of distribution.

Well, now it's up at YouTube, in 10 pieces (which I've stitched together here in a playlist for you). If you have 90 minutes free, and the inclination to sit at a computer and watch an essay-film by Orson Welles, knock yourself out. There's more info about it HERE in the Films section of the Wellesnet site (which seems to be impossible to access from the front page, for some reason).

If you don't want to spend that much time, I've also put together the three pieces of Welles' 1958 half-hour television film The Fountain of Youth. Not his best work, but rare and interesting - I nice slice of his Mr. Arkadin-period editorial style.

And finally, for those of you who haven't seen it . . . a piece of the embarrassing side of Mr. Welles: The famous (and sad) rushes of the Paul Masson wine commercial where it appears Orson has been enjoying the product a little too much prior to filming. Oh my.

( Filming Othello / The Fountain of Youth / AH, the French! )

Well now I'm having a mad posh to see Bogdanovich's The Last Picture Show again, which pays homage to Ambersons quite a bit at times -- Bogdanovich says he prefers that film (and Touch of Evil) to Kane, so it's no surprise that he grabs a lot from it for his film of a similar mood -- the entrance to the Christmas dance is an amazing replica of Eugene and Lucy's entrance to the ball in Ambersons, and the ending of Last Picture Show even takes an idea from the original, cut ending to the Welles film, playing a period comedy record underneath a quiet, sad scene of two people sitting near each other, unable to discuss their true feelings.

(Welles' personal contribution to the Bogdanovich film was, after PB had told him the plot of the film, remarking, "You're going to shoot it in black-and-white, of course?" Thanks, Orson.)

Amazing that I don't own a copy. I wonder how cheap I can find it for on Amazon? $11.50 including shipping? That's mine!

Oh, that reminds me . . . I never posted the answers for the films in my quote quiz that weren't correctly guessed. Here they are:

2. The Age of Innocence by Martin Scorsese
3. Bad Timing by Nicolas Roeg
6. Duck Amuck by Chuck Jones
9. How I Won the War by Richard Lester
12. Contempt by Jean-Luc Godard
14. THX-1138 by George Lucas and Walter Murch

9 out of 15 guessed correctly. Not bad, folks.

I am in the midst of trying to work out a schedule for my four shows -- The Magnificent Ambersons by Orson Welles: A Reconstruction for the Stage (June and maybe July), Harry in Love: A Manic Vaudeville by Richard Foreman (August), Spell (August), and Everything Must Go (Invisible Republic #2) (August).

There are currently 18 people cast (out of 21 I think I'll need) on Ambersons, a full cast of 13 on Everything (though I'm seeing if someone else can join us), a full cast of 12 on Spell, and a full cast of 6 (the easy one) on Harry in Love. 43 total actors currently (there are a few cast overlaps).

Trying to arrange a rehearsal schedule where I can get enough actors from any one show together to make having a rehearsal at all useful is mindbending -- Berit was a bit worried for me last night I think, as I would just sit for long periods of time looking at the Excel spreadsheets where I have potential rehearsal dates matched with conflicts and softly giggling to myself. When I'm faced with day after day of anywhere from one to sixteen actors unavailable, never leaving me with a good rehearsal group, I get a bit crazy.

That said, I worked a schedule out. I'm still "in the midst" of it all as I now have to type it out and send it to the casts and double-check to see that it works. And if I get enough new conflicts back the whole thing collapses like a furshlugginer house of cards and I have to start from scratch.

I need a break before embarking on the next stage of collating and typing and emailing the schedule info.

So to relax, I watch a Three Stooges short. And not just any Stooges short, but the one that's generally regarded in Stoogedom as the worst one they ever made. But I enjoy it, for a few reasons of my own:

1. It features Shemp Howard, not Curly Howard. I don't like Curly all that much (or any of the other third Stooges that joined Moe and Larry apart from Shemp, especially Joe DeRita, who lacked subtlety). I'll watch Shemp in anything.

2. It features a drunk Shemp hallucinating and seeing an immense cheesy pantomime bird.

3. It features the great Larry Fine in a rare central role, and not only that, he appears to be trying to parody (for no good reason) Marlon Brando. His lack of success in this impersonation instead creates a strange Brando/Fine collision unlike anything I've ever seen. Interestingly, this short was released only a few months after the film of Streetcar, so one wonders if Larry and/or the others saw Brando on stage, or were they just really churning these shorts out that fast (I suspect the latter).

4. My Junior-year film at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts - created in Reynold Weidenaar's excellent Experimental Workshop class - was titled "How Did You Manage To Steal a Car from a Rolling Train?" after a line of Moe's from this film (my film was written, co-produced, sound designed, and titled by my friend Sean Rockoff, a Stoogeaholic).

The director Christopher Carter Sanderson, when I told him where the title came from, and the response to the question from Larry, thereafter always seemed to regard the question and answer as some bizarre zen-ish "key" to my own psyche and personality. Make of that what you will.

I dedicated my film to Moe Howard and Andrei Tarkovsky. That's probably much more of a key to my inner life.

So here's the whole short behind the cut . . .

( CUCKOO ON A CHOO CHOO (1952) )

And in other "humor," I greatly enjoyed this account of the 12-hour deposition of Mr. Aron Wider, CEO of HTFC, an independent mortgage investor whose company is being sued by GMAC Bank for allegedly selling loans that weren't properly underwritten. The fine behavior of Mr. Wider, as seen in excerpts from the transcript, is a fine reflection of the upright and honorable behavior that has made the financial structure of this country so strong and unassailable. There is a drier account (that does feature a few more fine fine superfine quotes) in a law journal HERE.

In non-humor, Paul Scofield died. I loved his work, but I never feel I saw him in anything as good as he was (even Brook's film of Lear, which seems hobbled by its stage origins) - from all accounts his real greatness was on the stage, and I regret never seeing him there.

Back to work. Excelsior!

So Episode 5 of Penny Dreadful, "The Deb of Destruction," which I directed and designed, went by on Saturday and Sunday and went over quite well. I was really pleased with how it came out. We had good houses both shows, and it's a good thing we've now added the extra matinee for this monthly series - it was getting to the point of having to turn people away from the one Saturday night show, which we probably would have had to do this weekend without the extra show.

I really enjoyed doing this script, which had a bit of a Lynchian-Twin Peaks feel to it (one cast member called it Penny Dreadful: Fire Walk With Me) - good broad melodrama, scored with big loud Bernard Herrmann music from Hangover Square, White Witch Doctor, Beneath the 12-Mile Reef, and Citizen Kane (used most often for the scenes involving William Randolph Hearst, of course).

I was busy up in the booth running the show most of the time, so I didn't get to shoot many pictures of the show, but my camera was passed around on the floor (mainly in the hands of Matt Gray, I think), and a few shots came out okay.

Becky Byers was quite impressive as Abigail Pierce, the Deb of Destruction herself:

The dialogue-free, tense dinner scene (which I scored with the aria from Citizen Kane) was, as expected, the highlight of the show . . .

Unfortunately, we didn't get any shots of it from runthrus where it was done full-out to its VERY bloody conclusion.

Apart from that, I wound up with just a few behind the scenes shots, like this of Christiaan and Bryan planning something . . .

. . . this of our William Randolph Hearst and Abigail Pierce relaxing before cue-to-cue . . .

. . . and what I think is a self-portrait by Matt as Leslie Caldwell, Detective of the Supernatural . . .

Apart from that, the UTC#61 shows at Walkerspace went down, and I got to see Cat's Cradle at least, and we ended the six-episode run of the sitcom for the stage 3800 Elizabeth at The Battle Ranch.

Now, Berit and I can move onward properly to our shows for the rest of the year: The Magnificent Ambersons, Spell, Everything Must Go, and Harry in Love.

Of course, I also have a sizable role in next month's Penny Dreadful, as it turns out. {sigh}

PS As mentioned in the previous post, I've been getting complaints from some friends and family about this page taking forever to load, not loading completely, or just plain crashing the browser (usually Firefox, it appears). I think this has something to do with the amount of photos and videos I've been posting. I've started putting the videos behind LJ cuts, and if that's not enough, I'll do that more with posts containing lots of photos. Let me know in comments if there's any improvement already. Thanks.

Not a lot of time for much of a Friday post - I need to be finishing the sound and video segments for tomorrow's Penny Dreadful episode.

We ran the episode twice last night in the space, and it looks and sounds great thus far. A "special guest actor" who will be appearing in the next episode came by to record a voiceover by his character that precedes him in this one -- the next episode, directed by Michael Gardner, is mostly a conversation between me as George Westinghouse and this actor as . . . someone else famous. I'm now growing my facial hair out so I can wind up with Westinghouse's distinctive walrusy look by next month - I'll trim it like that for the weekend of the show, then take the whole thing off and go to my new warm-weather look with no beard and lighter hair.

I have to get a little sound work and a lot of video work done now -- and in not much time if I want to see Cat's Cradle tonight. I realized only a couple of days ago that my sickness had knocked out all the opportunities for me to see any of the UTC#61 shows at Walkerspace, as I had Penny Dreadful all the remaining days. Tonight, I was planning on going into The Brick post-Notes from Underground and pre-teching the show before the tech proper tomorrow morning. Well, it's pretty bad form not to see any of the UTC shows (I am on the artistic board of the company, after all), so I'm going to try and make it to the show tonight, then rush over to The Brick and work there from 10.30 pm onward. If I wind up there past 3 am, I'll just spend the night and be there ready to go for the 9.00 am tech.

So here's the info about this cool show:

at the Brick
575 Metropolitan Avenue - Williamsburg, Brooklyn
L Train to Lorimer / G Train to Metropolitan-Grand

Saturday, March 15 at 10.30 pm / Sunday, March 16 at 2.00 pm

with Becky Byers as Abigail Pierce, the Deb of Destruction
and Bryan Enk as Cyrus Pierce, Christiaan Koop as Martha Pierce, Aaron Baker as Battlin' Bob Ford, Matt Gray as Leslie Caldwell, Detective of the Supernatural, Maggie Cino as Emma Goldman, Mateo Moreno as Alexander "Sasha" Berkman and a Police Officer, Dan Maccarone as a Pinkerton Detective, and Trawets Sivart as William Randolph Hearst.
with The Voice of The Wizard of Menlo Park
and ??? as THE BLACK DRAGON!

written and produced by Bryan Enk and Matt Gray
direction, sound design and video by Ian W. Hill
costume design by Christiaan Koop and Matt Gray
light design and technicals by Ian W. Hill and Berit Johnson

Tickets are $10.00 - advance tickets available HERE

So, here's the first ten random from the iPod of 25,532 this morning, as Hooker circles me, determined to get onto a lap that isn't really there, and where he will just cause more trouble:

1. "Blue Monday" - New Order - Substance
2. "Head Held High" - The Velvet Underground - Loaded
3. "Skinny Minnie" - The Sonics - Psycho-Sonic
4. "Sweeney Todd, The Barber" - Stanley Holloway - Cannibals-a-Go-Go!
5. "Don't Fall Down" - The 13th Floor Elevators - The Psychedelic Sounds of
6. "Time Is On My Side (alternate version)" - The Rolling Stones - The Rolling Stones No. 2
7. "Batusi! A-Go! Go! - or - (I Shouldn't Wish To Attract Attention)" - Nelson Riddle - Batman - Exclusive Original Television Soundtrack Album
8. "Why Not?" - Frank Zappa - Civilization Phaze III
9. "Wayfaring Stranger" - Johnny Cash - American III: Solitary Man
10. "Check Point Charlie" - Eddie Warner - Le Jazzbeat! 2

And here's the only cat photo I haven't posted, of Hooker and Moni all cacked out on the couch:

Back to work. See you at the show.

So I'm feeling better - not 100%, but well enough to go start directing today, though I should probably keep as far away from the actors as I possibly can. Berit will also be going back to work house managing the UTC#61 shows at Walkerspace after four days down.

Even such a relatively short, small-cast piece as this Penny Dreadful is giving me agita when it comes to rehearsal schedules and the like. Of course I can't get actors together who are in scenes together until performance/tech day! Of course. It'll work fine. Just wish I could see it work sooner and more often.

Back over at the meme from a few days ago, there are still six quotes left unidentified out of the 15 quotes from my 16 Top Favorite Movies (as one of the Top 15 had no "memorable quotes" on IMDb). Some of them are hard ones I didn't expect anyone to get, but some of them should have been pegged by now.

Well, here's some help. Since I had to figure out what my top 15 films were right now (an occasional chore - someday I should post the many lists of "favorite films" I have, all carefully dated as I knew the lists would change, going back over 20 years), I had to start with a bigger list and winnow it down. So I went to my IMDB page where I've rated several thousand movies (I was trying to give a rating to EVERY movie I've ever seen, but I haven't kept up with it) - you can see these ratings HERE - and grabbed the films from my highest-rated ones that just leaped out at me and made me just feel "favorite film." I wound up with a list of 45, so I've gone back and added another five.

Here's my 50 Favorite Films as of today:

The Age of Innocence (1993) by Martin Scorcese
Apocalypse Now (1979) by Francis Coppola
Bad Timing (1980) by Nicolas Roeg
Barry Lyndon (1975) by Stanley Kubrick
Barton Fink (1991) by Joel and Ethan Coen
Black Narcissus (1947) by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger
Citizen Kane (1941) by Orson Welles
Contempt (1963) by Jean-Luc Godard
Detour (1945) by Edgar G. Ulmer
The Devils (1971) by Ken Russell
Double Indemnity (1944) by Billy Wilder
Duck Amuck (1953) by Chuck Jones
Eraserhead (1977) by David Lynch
The Falls (1980) by Peter Greenaway
Glen or Glenda? (1953) by Edward D. Wood Jr.
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1966) by Sergio Leone
Head (1968) by Bob Rafelson et al.
Heavenly Creatures (1994) by Peter Jackson
Hellzapoppin' (1941) by Erle C. Kenton et al.
High and Low (1963) by Akira Kurosawa
Hour of the Wolf (1968) by Ingmar Bergman
How I Won the War (1967) by Richard Lester
Jackie Brown (1997) by Quentin Tarantino
The Killers (1964) by Don Siegel
Kiss Me Deadly (1955) by Robert Aldrich
The Last Picture Show (1971) by Peter Bogdanovich
Lost Highway (1997) by David Lynch
Mean Streets (1973) by Martin Scorcese
Mulholland Dr. (2001) by David Lynch
Once Upon a Time in the West (1968) by Sergio Leone
Peeping Tom (1960) by Michael Powell
Performance (1970) by Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg
Persona (1966) by Ingmar Bergman
Point Blank (1967) by John Boorman
The Red Shoes (1948) by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger
Schizopolis (1996) by Steven Soderbergh
The Seventh Victim (1943) by Mark Robson and Val Lewton
Singing on the Treadmill (1974) by Gyula Gazdag
Sorcerer (1977) by William Friedkin
Stardust Memories (1980) by Woody Allen
Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927) by F.W. Murnau
Targets (1968) by Peter Bogdanovich
THX-1138 (1971) by George Lucas and Walter Murch
Tout Va Bien (1972) by Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin
2 or 3 Things That I Know About Her (1967) by Jean-Luc Godard
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) by Stanley Kubrick
Videodrome (1983) by David Cronenberg
W.R. - Mysteries of the Organism (1971) by Dusan Makavejev
Wavelength (1967) by Michael Snow
A Zed & Two Noughts (1985) by Peter Greenaway

Ask me again in a few days and there could be 5-10 changes on there. But the remaining unidentified six quotes are from among these films . . .

Oh, man. Berit and I are very VERY ill. We can do very little but lie around, sleep, moan, complain, take warm baths, cough, etc. Yesterday, B had an increase of symptoms that required a trip to the emergency room and some antibiotics (conjunctivitis), and now we're hoping I don't catch that complication (and as my left eye is beginning to twitch and water, this may be moot).

And I have to go hold auditions for Penny Dreadful at 7.30 pm tonight. Fun fun fun.

So, anyway, there's a movie quote meme going around. No one tagged me, but I'm bored and achy so I'm joining in anyway. It started in the theatre blogs with Joshua James, and has extended to at least Isaac, Matt Freeman, Adam Szymkowicz, James Comtois, and Jamie thus far. I have been accused of being too good at playing this and identifying the quotes, but that's only really been with Isaac and Matt, where there's an overlap of tastes, it seems.

For in this meme, you find your 15 favorite films on IMDb and pull a quote from the file there, and see who can identify the movie. As each quote is identified, I'll check them off (this is actually from my top 16 films, as one of my top 15 had no quotes listed on IMDb). How many will people get of these, I wonder . . ?


1. I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do. Caught by Tom X. Chao - 2001: A Space Odyssey by Stanley Kubrick

2. -- Is New York such a labyrinth? I thought it was all straight up and down like Fifth Avenue. All the cross streets numbered and big honest labels on everything.
-- Everything is labeled, but everybody is not.
-- Then I must count on you for warnings too.

3. You tell the truth about a lie so beautifully.

4. I've only a hundred guineas left to give you for I lost the rest at cards last night. Kiss me, me boy, for we'll never meet again. And Tom X. Chao picks up another - Barry Lyndon, also from Mr. Kubrick

5. You can't buy a bag of peanuts in this town without someone writing a song about you. Indeed this is from Orson Welles' Citizen Kane as noted by "GK" - Greg Kotis? Glenn Kenny? I can't be sure . . .

6. This is a close-up?

7. I put every damn pipe in this neighborhood. People think that pipes grow in their homes. But they sure as hell don't! Look at my knees! Look at my knees! And Tom X. Chao gets another: Eraserhead by David Lynch

8. Only the infinity of the depths of a man's mind can really tell the story. Cait Brennan gets it - Glen or Glenda? by Edward D. Wood, Jr.

9. Never underrate the wily Pathan. What we're going on to now is the wily Pathan, followed the use of and handling of anti-gas carpet. The Pathan lives in India. India is a hot, strange country. It's full of wily Pathans and they're up to wily things, which is why I always wear spurs, even in cold weather. Now, my advice to you is always to keep your rifle strapped to a suitable portion of your body - your leg is good. Otherwise, you'll find the wily Pathan will strip himself mother-naked, grease himself all over - slippery as an eel - make off with your rifle, which is a crime. Any questions so far, or can we take gas?

10. I'll see you in a year or two if I don't get shot. Finally grabbed by daveroguesf after a screening of Peter Bogdanovich's The Last Picture Show

11. We've met before, haven't we? James Comtois knows my Lynch love too well; this is indeed from Lost Highway

12. Now it's no longer the presence of God, but the absence of God, that reassures man. It's very strange, but true.

13. To you, I'm an atheist; to God, I'm the loyal opposition. Cait Brennan gets another - Stardust Memories by Woody Allen

14. Combined with economic advantages of the mating structure, it far surpasses any disadvantages in increased perversions. A final tran - An infinite translated mathematics of tolerance and charity among artificial memory devices is ultimately binary. Stimulating rhetoric... absolute. The theater of noise is proof of our potential. The circulation of autotypes. The golden talisman underfoot is phenomenon approaching. And, in the history of now, all ethos are designed.

15. I think that you'll find a little S&M will be necessary to trigger off a good healthy dose of hallucinations. And it's Cait once again who knows it - Videodrome by David Cronenberg

Okay, in pain again. Back to a warm shower and bath before I have to go off to auditions . . .

Well, the horrible sickness that's been all over Berit for most of the week, and seemed to be just lingering in me at a low, tolerable level, has decided to come forth in all its glory for me today, with wracking coughs, joint pain, tissue aches, and a head that both pounds and is light and confused.

I was supposed to be at 3800 Elizabeth rehearsal today as stage manager, but had to call and beg off at around 10.30 am, feeling a little guilty as I wasn't quite so bad at that point. By an hour later, no guilt about it, I'm really sick.

And, unfortunately, I am going to have to go in tonight to Tribeca to help out with the Cat's Cradle box office as promised, mainly because I'm hoping to have a chance to audition someone from that company for Ambersons before the show. I don't know if I'll be staying for the show as I'd hoped, though. Tomorrow I have rehearsal and performance of 3800 in the afternoon and evening, and if I can't audition that person tonight, I'll have to do it at The Brick at 10.30 am tomorrow morning. I'll need rest.

I keep falling asleep for little unexpected naps and having unpleasantly specific dreams about having car accidents (swerving to avoid hitting a dog at Ditmas and Ocean Parkway and heading for the trees; taking a turn on the BQE a little too fast and sideswiping into the crash resisters at the southbound construction point where the road is temporarily forked; etc.) - and I always wake up right at the decisive point where I will either definitely have the accident or might just possibly avoid it, which leaves a horrible feeling of unfinishedness in my waking self.

And of course I'll be driving into Manhattan later tonight as the F Train is screwed up this weekend. Nice.

Last night we finished the shoot on Daniel's video with the one-shots of me in the kitchen scene. Pretty quick, pretty simple. I got to see the rushes of the slasher movie footage we shot on Wednesday, and it looked even better than I expected. Hysterical. Daniel sent me some frame captures from the footage we shot Thursday, in the basement and on the stoop - in the last post you got to see what the lighting actually looked like on the set, so here's what it looked like in the camera:

That's me as the slasher film director with my crew.

And there I am, freezing, on the stoop outside (hiding a knife behind my back, being paranoid).

This has to be done for a contest by early next week, so hopefully it will be somewhere online soon enough for me to point you to.

The book I'm reading that keeps sending me to sleep (not a reflection on the book, but on the difficulty of reading right now) is This Is Orson Welles, his interviews with Peter Bogdanovich from the 60s-70s. I often remember this as more of a collection of Welles' tall tales and fabulisms than it is (don't get me wrong, Welles' stories are often better than the truth, but they get tired once you've read them a dozen times). There's a lot of gold in Welles' observations. Two passages stood out to me this time, regarding current or recent concerns of mine - this first, recorded in a restaurant in Rome in 1969:

PETER BOGDANOVICH: You've been quoted as saying the theatre is on its last legs--
ORSON WELLES: Sure . . .
PB: --but that it's always been dying.
OW: Everybody's said that, ever since the Greeks. The Fabulous Invalid, that was what Kaufman and Hart called the theatre. They wrote a play with that title, and one of the characters was based on me, I'm proud to say . . . for the record, I hope I didn't seem to be saying that the theatre is finished. Great artists continue to perform in it, but it's no longer hooked up to the main powerhouse. Theatre persists as one of those divine anachronisms -- like grand opera (which I much prefer) and classical ballet (which I don't really dig at all). A performing art, more than a creative one, a source of joy and wonder, but not a thing of now.
PB: The "thing of now," of course, being film?
OW: Number One. And then there's television, still largely undiscovered territory . . .
PB: How about radio?
OW: An abandoned mine.
PB: That means radio has become another anachronism?
OW: Sure, like silent movies -- a victim of technological restlessness. Radio still functions in a way, of course; but the silents are wiped out. That's like giving up all watercolors because somebody invented oil paint. And black-and-white is going the same silly route. For me, radio's a personal loss, I miss it very much . . .

I am a bit wistful for the time (which I still remember the tail end of) when film was "the thing of now."

This next bit (recorded in Hollywood, late 1970s) must have stuck in my mind in conceiving Ian W. Hill's Hamlet:

PB: You said [Shakespeare] wasn't interested in the bourgeoisie.
OW: That was an age, you see, where there was lots of room at the top. In his plays, the common folk are mainly clowns.
PB: You'd say he was a snob.
OW: He was a country boy, the son of a butcher, who'd made it into court. He spent years getting himself a coat of arms. He wrote mostly about kings. We can't have a great Shakespearian theatre in America anymore, because it's impossible for today's American actors to comprehend what Shakespeare meant by "king." They think a king is just a gentleman who finds himself wearing a crown and sitting on a throne.

I was also going to post a couple of videos of Marianne Faithfull at different points of her career, but I need something more cheerful, so here are three videos to laugh at, laugh with, and get all touched by.

( Now behind a cut for easier loading . . . )

Oh, boy, I'm getting woozy here. Better lie down and put on a video or something and rest a bit. I've been thinking of watching Terry Gilliam's Brazil, but that might be a hair too nightmarish in my present state.

Ah, who am I kidding, that's exactly how I like it. Brazil it is then . . .

More videos (and especially song performance videos) have been showing up in my YouTube favorites lately. And since I've been seeing more performances I've wanted to save and watch again, I might as well include them here, too.

( Now behind a cut for easier loading . . . )

(sorry if any of these wind up vanishing - they don't always wind up staying posted)

Last night, the first day of a three-day DV shoot for a short-short piece by Daniel McKleinfeld. Quite fun, actually.

Three scenes, three locations (all in and around Daniel and Sally's home), one per day. Nice and leisurely, really.

I don't think I'm supposed to describe it in any detail, but it involves the cast and crew of a small, lousy little slasher movie behind the scenes on the set - so the photos of us behind the scenes aren't too different in some ways from what we were shooting. I was performing in the piece as the writer/director of the crappy movie and was also acting as what the Brits used to call (in one of my favorite now-obsolete job titles) "Lighting Cameraman" - that is, I lit the sets but didn't touch the camera at all except to check exposure.

Daniel asked for Cassavetes-realism for the scene of the crew talking about the film in the location's kitchen, so we lit it pretty much with practicals, with 250w bulbs in the fixtures, with a few 40w and 60w as fill light on faces here and there. We're shooting 24fps video, which requires light something like shooting 400 ASA 16mm movie film, to my eye - much more than the DV I've shot before. Looks lovely, though, the 24fps.

For the other two scenes, I have to light realistically again on the front stoop of the building at night - just pumping in more light to look like the real thing, with fill again - and I also get to light the scene from the film-within-the-video, in the basement, where I get to do deliberately bad, Friday the 13th/80s slasher movie lighting: general, low, unjustified midnight blue glow with impossible-in-reality slashes of green across it and silly patterns of red thrown against things. I enjoy imitating silly lighting - maybe 'cause I actually somewhat like the extremity of it sometimes and enjoy the chance to go overboard. And more so.

It was a fun group and a fun shoot. Here, Daniel watches his wife Sally throw blood on Jessi Gotta in her prom dress (she's the "victim" in the slasher film):

Jessi - who played the Ophelia-figure in my production of Havel's Temptation and Ophelia herself in Ian W. Hill's Hamlet - knows how to act in a bloody prom dress, going all coy:

Daniel (on camera) and Sally (on boom mic) set up the two shot of Danny Bowes (making, apparently, his film/video debut as the "Killer" in the slasher film) and Michele Schlossberg (as the production manager):

Daniel wasn't noticing where he was walking so much as he set up another shot, and kept walking further and further back into Michele's space, where she had tried to wedge herself out of the way. It was suggested that Michele treat the director as they like to be treated, and she obliged - Sally was amused, Daniel remained oblivious:

It took forever to get the right frame for this shot - Daniel looks for just the right place for the two-shot of Jessi and Josh (real-life gore makeup specialist playing it onscreen) as he applies latex to her neck:

Oh, great - I get to do the lighting I like at the end of the scene! My character, deranged, sees everyone in the room laughing at him in distorted, expressionistic shots. So we got to go for that Murnau-Last Laugh effect by having Daniel come in close and hand-held on everyone in the room one-by-one as I shook a 250w bulb in a cliplight at them from a short ways away - looked great through the lens, looked kinda silly on the set (Sally took this shot):

Leaving shortly for auditions for my own shows - back to the video shoot tomorrow and Thursday. More photos then.