CollisionWorks

I should probably mention this again in a couple weeks, as the date actually draws close, but while it's on my mind . . .

I'll be appearing in a staged reading at Ensemble Studio Theater on April 6. Here's the info:


Doctors Jane and Alexander

Using found, fabricated, and occasionally finagled text, Edward Einhorn explores the life of his grandfather -- Dr. Alexander Wiener, the co-discoverer of the Rh factor in blood -- through interviews with his mother, Jane Einhorn, a PhD psychologist who recently retired due to a debilitating stroke. In the course of these interviews, his grandfather's ambitions and achievements are contrasted with his mother's, and ultimately with his own.

Written and Directed by Edward Einhorn

performed by Peter Bean, Talaura Harms, Ian W. Hill, Tanya Khordoc, Josh Mertz, Alyssa Simon, Scott Simpson

Part of the First Light Festival (plays about science).

Friday, April 6, 2007 at 7.00 pm
Ensemble Studio Theater, 549 West 52 Street (near 11th Avenue)
Tickets are $10.00

The listing, with ticket info, is here at the Ensemble Studio Theater site.


I directed the original short version of this play as part of Untitled Theater Co. #61's NEUROFest. Edward has received a grant to rewrite it as a full-length play, and has been working on it for some time. We've done one previous reading at EST (with Lisa Kron as Jane), and a number of other informal ones as Edward has needed to hear his drafts aloud and get feedback. The play is getting better and better and has become something quite special, I think.



I'm especially pleased that (good as Ms. Kron was for a quickly rehearsed staged reading) Alyssa Simon is reprising her wonderful performance as Jane from the original short version we did. I'm playing the part of Edward's grandfather, Dr. Alexander Weiner.

It's going to be good; hope some of you are interested.

Haven't done this in a while.

Blogroll below, inside the LJ Cut. Too many, really - I've also added in a few of my LJ Friends (if I wasn't sure how they'd feel about it, I didn't include them, though they can be found over on my friends page). I've also thrown in a couple that I check when I remember to, which for some reason have defective feeds that don't update properly in Bloglines (or don't show up at all).

I keep cutting blogs and getting it down to a reasonable level, then finding lots of ones I HAVE TO KEEP. {sigh} Hope you find some things of interest.

( Blogroll Inside . . . )

In a rush to get out the door to see a (VERY) early show of 300 with Aaron Baker. I'm not sure I'd be going to see this film except that it's what's playing in IMAX up at Lincoln Center, and Aaron really is selling me on seeing something, ANYTHING, in IMAX, which I've never done (and with my obsession with different film formats/aspect ratios, I should see an IMAX film).

So, let me try to do the fastest annotations on today's Random Ten I can, just a few words:

1. "Try Not To Breathe" - R.E.M. - Automatic For The People
Works. Underrated period, overrated album, songs work better on their own, boring all together.

2. "Highway 49" - Howlin' Wolf - Muddy & The Wolf
Slick but good. Can't make that voice slick.

3. "In My Room" - The Beach Boys - Greatest Hits
The greatest. Almost. Brian's beaten it a few times. But close.

4. "There Is A Happy Land" - David Bowie - David Bowie
Sappy, maybe, but Bowie always had a good feel for pop.

5. "Don't Ever Change" - The Kinks - Kinda Kinks
I MUST spend more time with The Kinks - it's all good, but I don't GET it yet. It gets better and better.

6. "Just a Little Bit" - The Undertakers - The Pye Story Volume 3
60s Britpop that works. Would love to hear this the right way, on a 45rpm single through a little portable player. Would sound better. Overdriven and cool.

7. "Louie Louie (live)" - The Persuasions - The Louie Louie Files
Stripped down to just the doo-wop part of the song. A valuable variant.

8. "Rebellious Jukebox" - The Fall - The Complete Peel Sessions 1978-2004
Nasty. Nice. Need to know more.

9. "Cold Hard Times" - Lee Hazlewood - Cowboy In Sweden
Ladies and gentlemen, Not-Leonard Cohen! Sweet, though muffled. Sad, too.

10. "Jungle Drums (Canto Karabali)" - Esquivel - History of Space-Age Pop Volume 2: Mallets in Wonderland
As the title suggests, more big booming percussion than usual from Esquivel. And trumpets. Works good.

Time to run.

Back to (somewhat) regular posting, and with one o' them silly Intarweb quiz-meme things, courtesy of nico_shalom, yet:

The Part of You That No One Sees

You are unique, witty, and even a little snobby. You're quite proud of who you are, and nothing is going to change that. You've paved your own way in life, and you've ended up where you want to be. Underneath it all, you feel very isolated from the rest of the world. It's hard to find people to relate to you on every level. The mundane interests of your friends and family often bore or depress you.

This is, of course, for entertainment purposes only . . .

The snow has come down hard on Portland, but it looks to be over and done. Well, it's just turned to freezing rain, so not really an improvement, I guess.

I've had all the final, not-really-necessary-but-nice-to-get-done work done on Petey Plymouth up here, and am glad to be coming back to NYC shortly with a minivan in great shape.


And the iPod is now up to containing 19,907 songs, 68.25 gigs, 43.7 days of music (and other occasional oddities). Let's see what comes up this afternoon . . .


1. "Melancholy Music Man" - The Righteous Brothers - Anthology 1962-1974)

The song is probably unbearably sappy, really, but I can enjoy almost anything if it's sung by Hatfield and Medley (almost - there is that rotten, nails-on-a-blackboard "Rock and Roll Heaven" song . . . yeesh!). Too short, this one, doesn't get that BUILD going that it should.


2. "Luci Baines" - The Jigsaw Seen - Delphonic Sounds

Cover of a 1960s single on the Del-Fi label from a compilation. Don't know the original song (which seems to refer to the then-President's daughter), don't know who did it, don't know this band doing it now, but it's beautiful. Real candy-coated pop, keeping the 60s feel with a 90s production.


3. "People Say" - The Dixie Cups - Best Of The Girl Groups

Huh. Thought I really knew and liked this song. Suddenly it seems rather poky and unenergetic. I went and looked to be sure this wasn't a cover or alternate take that I also have. Nope, this is the original. I thought there was more power to it. Good song, still, just could be pepped up a bit.


4. "Ohm Is Where The Heart Is" - The Residents - WB:RMX

Great, long track combining the best parts of early and recent Residents. This is originally a track from the first "album" that they ever created, around 1969 or 70, I think. They sent the tape to Hal Halverstadt at Warner Bros. records, knowing of his support of "odd" artists such as Captain Beefheart. He sent it back to them with a polite refusal note - the envelope was addressed to "Residents," and so, while they didn't get an album deal, they were at least given a name. The tape sat around for around 30 years, unheard. Then they dragged it out and "remixed" it - which seems to have involved lots of loops, samples, added drum tracks, and extensive new work. The original was apparently more jarring and discordant than their first released album, Meet the Residents, and this is like real music. Best thing they've done in years, this album.


5. "Good Good Lovin'" - James Brown - Star Time

I miss James. This is a relatively early track that I've included on every "dance mix" tape I've ever made. Aaron Beall liked having the casts of his shows dance to one song together before every performance - I've done this, too, but not as a mandatory thing - and this was the favored one before every performance of Kirk Wood Bromley's Want's Unwished Work in '96. We needed a good jolt before that show, to give us the speed-freak pace the play requires. At one performance, several cast members insisted on a laid-back, reggae song instead, and we gave a lousy, unenergetic performance that day. It was back to JB after that disaster.


6. "Be a Zombie" - Los Reactors - Be a Zombie/Laboratory Baby 7"

Tight, lo-fi, punk-becoming-new-wave 45 single. Brings back memories of a time and place, though I didn't know this song until recently - I heard plenty like it back in school then. Simple and direct and powerful. No pretensions.


7. "Life's An Elevator" - T.Rex - History of T.Rex—The Singles Collection

Sweet, soft, acoustic ballad with a pretty obvious metaphoric chorus, but Bolan makes silly things sound profound, as usual.


8. "Stay Hungry" - Talking Heads - More Songs About Buildings And Food

I'm a big Heads fan, grew up that way. Never liked this song until recently though. Too jumpy in the wrong way. Now I do. I think I've listened to all the Heads I really liked too much, so there's nothing much there for me anymore. Now all the songs I ignored sound full of depth and life. Familiarity breeds contempt, or if not contempt, boredom, even in the loved.


9. "TKO" - Off Beats - Dumb Looks Still Free

For some reason, when I got the most recent two Pere Ubu albums from Smog Veil records, my package contained two additional CDs, which I guess they had spares of and were giving away. One was a comp of Cleveland punk groups - about a third great, a third OK, and a third lousy - and this comp of "greatest hits" by this Cleveland punk group. Again, about the same ratio of great/OK/lousy. This is an OK one. Terribly recorded.


10. "Strawman" - Lou Reed - New York

The summer this album came out, it was MY ALBUM. I had been getting heavily into Reed for a few years, and suddenly he came out with this. Nothing had sounded so ballsy in years. I played it over and over.

By the end of the summer, I hated this damned thing. Yeah, it sounds great, but the songwriting is incredibly sloppy and shitty. When Reed began billing himself as a "poet," which he did around this time, his lyrics went to hell. They sound like bad first drafts, except for two or three songs, including this one ("Romeo Had Juliette" is still a great, GREAT song). The guitars are amazing, though. I think I like this one as much for being great curtain-call music for Tina Landau's production of Chuck Mee's Orestes, done on a rotting dock on the Hudson River (I saw the July 4 performance, and as this song played out, you could see fireworks all over New Jersey).

I was still writing lots of songs at the time this came out (and everyone was telling me my singing voice sounded like Reed, which I was also getting sick of hearing), and I started a kind of tribute song to Reed right after getting the album. By the time I finished the song two years later, it had gone from a tribute song to a parody of his . Still a favorite of mine to play any time I pick up a guitar (not very often these days, unfortunately).


Maybe some cat blogging later, if I can borrow my mom's camera and take some nice shots of our loaner cat up here, Bappers.

And hmnnn again.


A link courtesy of Rosmar.

collisionwork is emotionally distant.

I bet no one's surprised that you never post your current mood. In fact, I bet most of your friends are so sick of you locking them out of your life that they hate you behind your back. Shame.

wanna know your lj's moodring color? enter your user name and hit the button. (discussion thread)

Well, that's just, like, your opinion, man, right?

From today's surfing, here in CollisionWorks North, Portland, ME:


Three lovely items from the Department of Misogyny Department:


1. Lucas Krech has pointed to this review in the Times of Artfuckers. Lucas points out the problems with this review quite elegantly HERE, if they're not obvious enough.


2. Meanwhile, back in the playroom, Mattel is helpfully making a series of "pink, purple, or sparkly" Matchbox-inspired toy cars for girls, with a game called "Race to the Mall."


3. Rape victims in Missouri (and, judging from the comments, in other states, probably) are responsible for paying for their rape kits.


On somewhat of the lighter side . . .


4. Unfortunately, it isn't true itself, only a sharp joke, but someone has taken on the persona of "Truisms" artist Jenny Holtzer, HERE, to rib MoMA director Glenn Lowry about his recent difficulties. UPDATE: Oops. Didn't check the link -- MoMA didn't have much of a sense of humor about this, and took down the eCard "Holtzer" from their site. Some of it is saved and reprinted HERE.


And on much more of the lighter side, how would you most like to be woken up in the morning? Well, if you can't have THAT, wouldn't it be nice to be woken up like this?


5. An alarm clock that speaks to you in the voice of Stephen Fry.

Yeah, gotta love those Kiwis.


So down in New Zealand, there's apparently a chain called Hell Pizza. They do all kinds of "edgy" ads and promo schemes based around their name.


They got in some trouble for their most recent billboard campaign, but I have to say it makes me laugh, anyway.





More on this can be found HERE.

And another, for you and yours . . .


1. "Reality" - David Bowie - Reality

Recently, mainly in regards to Bowie's hysterically funny appearance on Extras, I've been hearing the "Bowie hasn't done anything good in 20 years" line a lot. I assume this is from people who haven't been paying any attention to him in the last fourteen years. First, if you're going to use the "no good work since [whenever]" line with DB, you might as well go for saying it's been 27 years since he did anything good (Scary Monsters and Super Creeps). Second, though no album or project from 1981 to 1993 is fully up to the quality of what he was putting out from say, 1970-1980, the best of it is as good as anything from his "classic" period, and the worst of it is nowhere as bad as the worst material from that time.

Third, since 1993, the man has recorded some of the best albums he's ever put out, and no one's paying any goddamn attention to them in the USA (I was pleased recently to discover they are at least selling respectably in the UK; I thought they were flopping everywhere). The Buddha of Suburbia, Outside, Earthling, Heathen, and Reality are all excellent albums (there's another album in there, 'hours', which would go fourth on that list, but it isn't all that good, though it's not as bad as it's sometimes made out to be by Bowie fans; the songs on it are much better live). And no one cares.

I saw Bowie live after each of the last two albums, and watched audiences only come alive when he did "Changes," "Fame," and "Ziggy Stardust." "Changes" especially. That's going to be THE SONG that Bowie is remembered for. "Changes." I have almost all of his recorded work in the iTunes and iPod, from "Louie Louie Go Home" to "Bring Me the Disco King" -- 244 songs; I've left out very, very little from his entire career, really -- and you know what songs are among the ones I DON'T have in there? "Changes," "Fame," and "Ziggy Stardust," because they're not all that good and I wanted to leave room for all the better Bowie songs.

Now I didn't like either Earthling or Reality much when I first heard them, but repetition made me "hear them" better -- Berit likes to take credit for the fact that she "got" Reality first, after I had dismissed it as "scattered" and far inferior to Heathen, and it was only her playing it over and over that got me to actually listen to it. Yes, she's right. The songs on Reality, including this title track, tend to jump around and feel at first like parts of several different songs put together. The more you listen to them, the more cohesive they are.

Bowie's still doing great work, and should be paid attention to. I'm still waiting for the next one, anxiously (though he'll probably change direction and break my heart, AGAIN).


2. "Following You" - Pierre Dutour et Son Orchestre - Chappell Dance and Mood Music, volume 9

Late '60s slick, cool library track. Organ, guitar and horns. Big hard frantic drums. Exciting.


3. "King Kong" - Tarantu1a Ghoul & The Gravediggers - Las Vegas Grind! volume 2

Cheesy lounge-band "rock" with a great groove despite itself. Almost an instrumental, but occasional interjections from a female voice (and then calls from the band). "I'm goin' ape!" Good dancing or driving music.


4. "No One Receiving" - Brian Eno - Vocal (box set, originally from Before and After Science)

Isaac Butler recently asked at Parabasis if there was as important figure in post-Beatles rock as Brian Eno.

No, there isn't.

Besides his own solo song albums (this is the first track from the fourth one, from 1977, and sounds like the state-of-the-art in the "avant-garde" rock music of 1982), his influence, not only on the bands he produced himself, but on the music producers who either came up as his engineers and proteges, or who simply learned by example, has affected almost ALL popular music since 1980 or so. Wish he'd keep making song albums himself, though, those are my favorite work of his (his recent Another Day on Earth was okay, with fine moments, but thin altogether).

Here the groove takes over, predating his work with the Heads and David Byrne by a few years, but not sounding that different, and featuring the great vocal stylings of what I think of as "The Brian Eno Chorale" (as Bowie has said, "Brian, he sing all mix down and multi-tracked lik' a lil' girl!"). I noticed recently that Eno also has the BEST bass guitar sounds in all of his work. I don't know what he does, but no one gets the great bass sounds he does. Firm, solid, undistorted, driving without being bossy. Not easy.


5. "Steps in the Dark" - Gert Wilden & Orchestra - I Told You Not To Cry

More soundtrack loveliness. I don't know how many shows I've used this track in. Maybe not as many as I think. Slow, languid, sexy sleaziness, with a few peppy bits. Vibes and alto saxophone.


6. "Carolina in My Mind" - James Taylor - Those Classic Golden Years 07

Once again, the hated James Taylor shows up because I downloaded a comp of pop songs from a certain period that included him, listened to a bit of the song, thought, "Well, this is actually a kind of pretty little pop song," and kept it in the iTunes and iPod.

Well, this is actually a kind of pretty little pop song. His voice does get on my nerves, but the song is pleasant, and the arrangement is good. Nice change up from all the other stuff I have in here.


7. "Just Like a Woman" - Bob Dylan - Blonde on Blonde

Came nicely out of the previous song. Bob during the Great Time. Don't think I have anything to say about those two years of Dylan now except, listen to them.


8. "I Won't Cry" - Little David & The Harps - The Roots of Doo Wop - Savoy Vocal Groups

A histrionic without being quite over-the-top vocal performance enlivens this solid little track. Nothing special about it. Good, but there are dozens and dozens of sides like this.

This is from a comp that's meant to document the transitional period between "Black Vocal Groups" (The Ink Spots, The Mills Brothers) and "Doo Wop." This track is full-on doo wop. Close to actual rock & roll actually, with the drumming going on. Rock & roll drums.


9. "The Day the Devil" - Laurie Anderson - Strange Angels

Anderson's remake of a song she wrote with Peter Gordon for his 1986 album, Innocent, where it was done as more of a straight, slower, blues/gospel number as I remember (Gary Lucas on bottleneck guitar, vocal by Clarence Fountain). I have that on vinyl, and haven't listened to it in 15 years or so, so the memory is fuzzy.

Anderson's remake from 1990 is faster and peppier, lots o'synth, but scores big points for her wonderful distorted vocal as "The Devil" (whose monologue includes references to both Dylan's "Ballad of a Thin Man" and the Spuds McKenzie Budweiser ads) and for the full gospel choir that comes in for the chorus and finale.

I love this album of LA's, right from when she was learning to really, really sing. She's still holding back a bit on the record, but her voice is beautiful (I saw her live at BAM a few months after it came out, and she was vocally cutting loose on some of the album's songs, singing to the rafters, in a way she doesn't on the recording). Where's another great record from her? I've been waiting.


10. "Little Orphan Nannie" - Kaleidoscope - Side Trips

Music designed to make you say, "Man these guys are stoned!" Flagrantly "offbeat," "psychedelic," and "experimental" in a massively self-conscious way (catch the album title), though not quite (JUST not quite) so smug about it as to be annoying or unlistenable. Huge Zappa influences in use of sound effects bridging different song styles in different sections, weird little talking and comments off on the side, and a kind of snide quality to the harmony vocals. Fun, sure.


More work to happen to the car today; have to get out and get to it. Almost everything on it is fixed and working great now, just some "cosmetic" work to happen now (the side sliding door is broken and fastened with tie line to keep it closed).

Glad the car is working, we've got traveling to do. Tonight, off to The Brick to see the two plays by Thomas Bradshaw. Tomorrow, up to Garrison, NY to a gallery opening (paintings by Ivy Dachman, my stepmother). Sunday, up to Portland, ME. Maybe more later today. Don't know about the Friday Cat Blogging. I need new photos. Oh, I can't skip a week of that; I'll find something.

My old friend Vanessa Veselka, whom I've known for 24 years but haven't been in any contact with for the last 9, found me last night through email (via The Brick), and we're back in touch. She has had several wonderful bands over the last 15 years (Bell, The Pinkos, The Red Rose Girls) and now has a MySpace page HERE. Due to dial-up/computer issues, I can't listen to her songs there now, but if you're interested, please do. I'm glad to be in touch with her again. It's good to have friends going back that far (thanks to this blog, I'm back in touch with a friend I've known for nearly 30 years, too). I'm beginning to feel like this intarweb thing actually might bring people together rather than keep them apart . . .

2. Wonder


I love comic strips. I don't get daily papers anymore though, so the only ones I see now are the ones I subscribe to in my blogreader: Doonesbury, Mutts, Get Fuzzy, Dinosaur Comics, For Better or For Worse, Get Your War On, Dykes to Watch Out For, Two Lumps, and Zits. I have a fondness for the many other classic strips I grew up with which, frankly, aren't really that good at all. So The Comics Curmudgeon has been a godsend (I should also mention Joe Mathlete Explains Today's Marmaduke, for a more focused, one-strip approach).

Josh, the Curmudgeon, pulls out those comics that just need to be commented on, and gives it to them. So I only get the small, appropriate dose of such strips as Curtis, B.C., Gil Thorpe, Mary Worth, and Funky Winkerbean, to name just a few (and what the hell HAPPENED to Funky Winkerbean anyway? When I was growing up it was a semi-funny strip about high school kids, now it's a depressing soap opera about a bleak, hopeless world where nothing good can ever happen to anybody!).


One of the most-hated and discussed comics in the comments at The Comics Curmudgeon is Lynn Johnston's For Better or For Worse. I have been reading this comic since its inception, and as a result have become completely caught up in the saga of the Patterson family, who have been aging in real time over the last 30 years or so. I have been so close to this strip, following it so long, that it has only recently become apparent to me how horrible most of the people in it are, and how terrible Johnston's storytelling has become. But I'm trapped. I've been with them since the beginning. I have to follow the lives of the Pattersons, even as they've become a mawkish, sentimental, saintly group in a world of evil outsiders.

I was thinking I might be freed this year, when Johnston announced that she was ending the strip. But she has since changed her mind, and will allow other hands to continue the story, and worse, FAR WORSE, the characters are going to freeze in age where they are now! No, oh god, no no no. I can't stop reading it, and reading it gets more and more painful.

The only way to make it bearable is to decide (as many readers at Curmudgeon have done) that it's become some kind of Mulholland Drive situation, and that at some point Mike Patterson has slipped into a coma, and the events of the strip now are his deranged coma dreams, in which he and his family make all the wrong choices about everything, and yet somehow every keeps turning out better and better for them! Yeah, that works.


The Curmudgeon has also made me a fanatic for the hijinx of those wacky girls in Apartment 3-G, a strip I'd always heard of but never read. This soap-opera strip about three career girls in NYC, with glacial pacing and insane plot twists, has recently gone over the edge.

First, red-headed non-entity Tommie (who has had nothing interesting happen to her in 45 years or so of the strip's existence) sees a friend in an Off- or Off-Off-Broadway show (it's not clear; looks like something in-between), attends the cast party, tries to give an intelligent critique to the show's director, and instead suddenly finds his tongue in her mouth (see my new avatar above) -- yes, this happens all the time in NYC theatre, of course, that's why we do it (Berit notes that usually everyone's drunker first - a few well-placed bubbles around Tommie's head would have made the whole sequence more realistic). She's spent the past week going over this with Apartment 3-G's distaff-Sammy Glick, Margo, demon-goddess with hair the color of her blackened, shriveled soul. Worship the Margo, fools, for she is She Who Must Be Obeyed!

Now, bubble-headed blonde Luann, an aspiring painter who has her first NYC gallery show coming up, has rented a studio so she can work on her art in peace to get it all ready for the show (there are so many things wrong with that sentence I don't even WANT to try and mention them). The room she has rented as her studio once belonged to . . . okay, get this . . . Albert Pinkham Ryder. Yes, really. Don't know who he is? Check the link. Great painter. Eccentric guy. Character in Caleb Carr's sequel to The Alienist, The Angel of Darkness. Always kept a stew pot simmering, 24/7/365, that was all he ate from, into which he just kept throwing stuff. Crumpled up his smokes and other bizarre materials into his paintings. A favorite.

Shortly after she moved in, weird poltergeist activity started happening, and Luann began speaking to "Albert," who would reply by beeping Luann's microwave (ALBERT PINKHAM RYDER is in a comic strip, beeping someone's microwave?! The HELL?!). Maybe he's hoping she'll make him some stew.

Here's today's strip. Mr. Ryder has now manifested to Luann in ectoplasmic form. Either that, or it's President James A. Garfield in the guise of Ryder (I didn't imagine Ryder looking so spiffy, but maybe it's what being on The Other Side does for you). I can't WAIT to see where this goes. I am slightly worried that this will all turn out to be a series of hallucinations brought on by Luann's prolonged exposure to paint and turps fumes, but if we're lucky, Margo will wind up in a face-off with the ghost of A.P. Ryder for possession of the soul of Luann. We won't be lucky.


One of the best comments ever on Apartment 3-G was actually from TV's The Golden Girls, and reported by someone in the comments at Curmudgeon. I've never seen that show, so I have no idea who the characters are, and I'm repeating this from memory, but it was something like:

WOMAN #1: Let me have the paper, I have to keep up with my girls in Apartment 3-G.

WOMAN #2: I haven't read that comic strip since 1962.

WOMAN #1: Oh, you haven't? I'll fill you in. It's later that same afternoon . . .