CollisionWorks

Continuing the thoughts previously explored in this post and the video/performance Berit and I did at The Brick's Quinquennial Party . . .

Our Friend What-The-Fuck-Chuck has given a rave review to Tracy Letts' August: Osage County. All fine. All good. OK! I'm sure I would enjoy this show if I could afford it, from what I'm hearing.

However . . . (dilute, dilute) . . .

These lines from the review engage the gag reflex:

In other words, this isn’t theater-that’s-good-for-you theater. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that, to quote an immortal line from a beloved sitcom.) It’s theater that continually keeps you hooked with shocks, surprises and delights, although it has a moving, heart-sore core. Watching it is like sitting at home on a rainy night, greedily devouring two, three, four episodes of your favorite series in a row on DVR or DVD.

You know . . . I like a lot of what's on TV. Berit and I don't watch any at home (we gorge on it when visiting my mother in Maine) - we have neither cable nor antenna here - because we don't like it in the home, where it sucks energy away from the work you should be doing as you wind up watching the not-good stuff just because it's there.

But we watch quite a few series on DVD as they come out on Netflix, and I've thought for some time that the hour-long drama has indeed been going through a golden era these past few years. There is certainly great TV happening.

That said . . .

OKAY. Maybe he's just trying to sell a "difficult" play to an audience he thinks (condescendingly?) might rather stay home and watch the DVR (we have already learned of WTFC's fondness for Friday Night Lights, which, given my feelings about current TV, I'm more than willing to believe is deserved). Maybe he's sensitive to the negativity thrown his way by audiences who went to see Thom Pain (based on nothing) ("theater-that's-good-for-you-theater"?) based on his review and wants them to feel they won't get burned again.

But. Still.

Am I completely off-base and/or snooty to like to think that the best standard to hold up a theatrical work to is not a television drama?

UPDATE: Not a minute after posting the above, I came across an interesting post re: WTFC from Lee Rosenbaum at CultureGrrl. A bit off the subject above, but interesting - and I mean the second item about WTFC, not the first, innocuous one. The one Rosenbaum refers to as "disturbing."

Also, I would like to note that now that I've read WTFC's review of the original Chicago production, I can express my dislike of his work on one more count - one of the oldest, lazy-reviewer tricks there is: dragging in quotes from, or examples of other, "similar" works of art in your opening, "topic" paragraph to supposedly give your review "context," when you are in fact stuck for anything interesting of your own to say about the work immediately in front of you. In the Chicago review, he drags in works by Tennessee Williams, Eugene O'Neill, Lillian Hellman, and Edward Albee (phew! - why not throw in Brecht if you just want to enumerate destructive theatrical mother figures?); in the NYC review, he pulls out Tolstoy and one of the most overused quotes you'll find for this kind of opening (hell, it was old when Nabokov parodied it in the opening sentence of Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle 38 years ago!)

The one time I tried this trick with my 10th-grade English teacher, Jim Block, he mocked me so severely with his red pen that I never tried it again (I think). Would that WTFC had had such a hilariously cruel instructor at some point . . .

Oh, right, it's Friday.


Okay, a random ten - and still short of comments, as it has been recently. Too busy multi-tasking here to think and say even something short about these. Berit and I (but mostly Berit) finished transcribing the dialogue from the video of the 2001 production of NECROPOLIS 3: At the Mountains of Slumberland in an all-nighter, and I'm now putting in stage directions and fixing lines that were questionable or inaudible -- it's hard to transcribe from a bare-bones (albeit really well-shot) video of a stage production of people not-quite-lip-syncing but posing to a prerecorded track of dialogue made primarily of dense quotes from H.P. Lovecraft, often spoken VERY fast. Well, it's done, except for my cleanup, which will take a little bit, but I can have the script out to the actors (and ready for auditions) by this afternoon.

And as I do, these 10 came up first (now out of 21,078):


1. "Wrong Side" - French Kicks - One Time Bells
2. "Clap Your Hands" - They Might Be Giants - No!
3. "Big Business" - David Byrne -The Catherine Wheel
4. "The Train Kept A-Rollin'" - The Rogues - Pebbles Volume 1

Okay, this deserves comment - it's wonderful, but a great example of the game of "telephone" being played with cover tunes. This US garage band obviously knew the song from The Yardbirds' cover of the Johnny Burnette classic, but they've learned the lyrics phonetically from that (loud & distorted) version, and not all of them, so they pretty much repeat one, slightly incorrect, verse plus an equally slightly-off chorus. I think they're aware of that, so they make up with noise, energy, and repetition what they lack in accuracy. Good on them. It works.

No one covering this tune, however, has ever come close to anything as great as the original guitar break. I'm just sayin'.


5. "Miss Argentina" - Iggy Pop - Avenue B
6. unknown title - unknown artist - Pebbles Volume 3 - The Acid Gallery

I try to keep these out of the iPod, and I should eliminate this one - it's not interesting enough. Just a silly bonus track appended to the end of a Pebbles collection - a faux-"trippy" psychedelic monologue. Stupid without reward.


7. "Steve Canyon Blues" - Tom Herman - Datapanik in the Year Zero: Terminal Drive
8. "Oh Shit!" - Buzzcocks - Singles Going Steady
9. "It Hasn't Happened Yet" - William Shatner - Has Been
10. "To the Beat Y'All" - Lady B - The Sugar Hill Story: To the Beat Y'All


Berit and I are going to be screening 8 noir and neo-noir films at The Brick in two insane near 7-hour marathons as research for any actors in World Gone Wrong who need a bit of a grounding in the flavor of what the show is going for. We don't look to have a huge turnout (at least of people letting me know they're actually coming), but enough to have a valuable and fun time.

So this evening, we're watching Detour, Lost Highway, Double Indemnity, and The Big Combo. Sunday afternoon and evening we're going for D.O.A., Point Blank (these first two films being the primary inspiration for Acts I and II of the show, respectively), Kiss Me Deadly, and Bad Timing. These cover most of the tonal/thematic areas of the show, and are just good movies to watch in any case. I've also invited any friends and associates I thought would be interested to drop by - if you're reading this and you're in one of these groups and I forgot you (that is, if you have my email address or know me to speak to, pretty much), let me know and I'll send you details.


Also setting up auditions for the parts still to be cast in the shows. I have plenty of women and not nearly enough men. Always the case. {sigh} Well, looks to be enough good women that even if I lose the people I might lose, I could still be set on World Gone Wrong, with extras for Succubus/Slumberland. Now . . . about the men . . . well, maybe I'll get some more responses by this afternoon . . .


Oh, and here's a kitty picture I found as yet unposted, enjoy!





Wait a minute - gotta bitch here for a minute . . . I've been pissed off for years about how proper alphabetizing (as it once was practiced and as I once learned -- back in the 70s, granted) has been massively screwed by the computer revolution. Once upon a time, at least as I was taught, when titles started with actual numeric digits, they were to be alphabetized as if the number was actually spelled out. Which makes sense to me.

Since computers didn't easily think that way when they started taking everything over (I'm sure it would be a snap now, but no one gave a damn in 1984), numbers wound up preceding everything else in the computer world. And that has become the silly form. Okay, I've gotten used to that.

But I can't BELIEVE this new update they just threw into iTunes and onto my iPod. Not only have numbers have now been placed AFTER all the letters - which, okay, I can take, it's silly either way but whatever - but if a name starts with a symbol, it's treated as if the symbol DOESN'T EXIST! The HELL?

For example (since it's the example right in front of me), symbols used to precede numeric digits "alphabetically." So the first band listed in my iTunes was ? and The Mysterians. With the new update, they suddenly vanished from the top of my list, and they weren't anywhere to be found at the bottom either, next to the numbers they had been near. Eventually, I found them alphabetized under "And," for chrissakes!

So I changed the "And" in their name to an "&," which is my usual form anyway in writing out band names, and they vanished again. Took me a while, but I now found them listed under "Mysterians."

Okay, I mainly use my iTunes and iPod as a massive random shuffle device, but still, I'd like to know that if I want to hear "96 Tears," I'D KNOW WHERE IN THE HELL TO FIND IT WITH SOME KIND OF LOGIC!

(I am NOT going to give in and rename the band "Question Mark and the Mysterians" on there either - that's NOT their name, dammit!)


Okay, I'm a geek who grew up going to a school with an actual working print shop where we set type in composing sticks and some, like me, actually wound up getting to use linotype machines, and we were taught rigorously how typefaces are supposed to go together, and how alphabetizing and digits and symbols are supposed to work, and I was addicted to going over the volumes of the Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature in the school library. No one else cares. Except on this blog. Grrrrrrrrrrr . . . . .