CollisionWorks

On the drive home from Ossining and Thanksgiving with family (mine & Berit's) some kind of illness started in my throat. As it was a sudden inability to swallow, accompanied by fever and sweating, I was worried for a while that I had developed a sudden allergy to something I'd eaten and was having a reaction (this happened to Berit's dad a few years back -- developing an allergy to crab in his mid-50s, and discovering this while driving a car and passing out). Nope, just some nasty viral thing that is annoying, hanging on, lessened to a vaguely tolerable level by DayQuil and NyQuil, and which I've given (as everything like this passes) to Ms. Johnson.

I'd complain that this always seems to happen while we're in the middle of a show, but as we're almost always in the middle of a show, this should not be surprising.

In any case, the medicine got me through the ante-penultimate performance of Kitsch last night, which had a combined good/bad audience -- good, in that there was a larger number of people who got and enjoyed the humor of the show exactly as we intended; bad, in that there was a smaller group of people who were massively rude and noisy -- quite a few came quite late, stomped around, and then (some of the same people) talked throughout the show amongst themselves and kept (loudly, from the back row) going in and out of the theatre in pairs in the middle of scenes. One older gentleman was annoying for a bit in constantly getting up and leaving the theatre and coming back, but it became apparent that he was having coughing fits and was trying not to disturb other people -- he also had the foresight to sit where he could get in and out of the place without stomping in front of everyone. Alexis Sottile nicely chewed one couple behind her out at intermission for their incessant talking (I think I heard the words "this is not your living room" and/or "this is not television" in there), but they just seemed affronted that she had the nerve to say something to them. {sigh}.

In any case, between Thanksgiving, illness, the show, and Berit wanting control of the one computer in the house with internet access yesterday (it IS hers, after all), the weekly stuff's a day late. Whatever. I'm too sick to care.

Kitsch, Or: Two for the Price of One, as mentioned, has just two performances left, tonight at 8 and tomorrow at 3, and it's been going better and better, for the most part. I would say I'll be glad to move on and have some time off, but B & I don't get much time off immediately -- The Brick's Fight Fest starts up immediately after. Berit will be leaving the performance immediately after tomorrow to go over to The Brick to run the tech for Ten Directions' Deck the Hallmans, which she'll also be running board for on the run. Monday, I'm scheduled for an 11-hour shift supervising techs -- which will probably go longer, as things will go overtime, I'm sure, and I'm also the lighting designer on the last tech of the day, The Ninja Cherry Orchard. I'm also designing lights for Piper McKenzie's Craven Monkey and the Mountain of Fury, which I probably agreed to offhandedly at some point and then forgot about until I saw my name in the publicity. It happens.

Between Hallmans, Craven Monkey, and Ninja Cherry Orchard, we'll be working with practically the entire extended "Brick Family" in the Fight Fest (except those who are saving themselves for Richard Lovejoy's January show), which will be nice. Almost wish I had a show in the Fest myself, but that would have been impossible this year. Have to work on the ideas and script for the show that came to me in a dream as a possible Fight Fest show in case the Fest comes back as planned -- Fat Guy Fall Down. A nasty little thing, that. Painful, unfunny slapstick. We'll see how this year's Fest goes . . .

And, on this late day, here's a weekly Random Ten from the 25,055 tracks in the iPod (with associated links, where available):

1. "The Joker Is Wild" - Jan & Dean - The Jan & Dean Batman Album
2. "Season Comes" - The Feebeez - Girls In The Garage Vol. 4
3. "Put You In The Picture" - Rich Kids - Ghosts of Princes in Towers
4. "Remorse" - Gerald Fried - Star Trek - "Amok Time"
5. "Six Dreams" - The Seeds - Future
6. "Beeswing (live 1994)" - Richard Thompson - Two Letter Words
7. "Baby Wachadoin To Me" - Walter Davis - The First Days of Funk - volume 1
8. "P.A.S." - Scritti Politti - Early
9. "Dr. Strangelove" - WFMU - Station Promos
10. "And I'm Glad" - The Interns - Tyme Won't Change: USA Garage Greats 1965-1967

And no pictures, as the camera was stolen and the cats won't hold still for the iMac camera. So, back to being sick and resting up for tonight's show (and closing party, the day BEFORE we actually close).

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 . . .