CollisionWorks

Well, the Wedding proceeds apace. Yesterday, we got the license. Last night, we had a proper rehearsal and staged the show. Today, we drop off our clothes for some minor tailoring. Finishing up our little checklist bit by bit.

It looks to be a good show. A fun wedding as such, and an okay piece of theatre. It'll "work" as both -- I was worried it wouldn't do for either, in it's attempt to serve two masters, but it'll serve them okay. I wanted to have it feel like one of my regular shows, which means that I can't avoid having a little "creepy" stuff that isn't really normal for a wedding, but whatever, it's one of my shows, so it has to be what it should be (though I'm a HAIR worried by having to win the audience back after some oddness at the start, but as Berit says . . . well, maybe I'll leave out what Berit says).

There's one section that might offend some family members, but it's necessary for it to be in there to be honest to ourselves. There's another section that will be DEFINITELY offensive to some family members, and we . . . won't be doing that bit at the wedding our families will be attending. We don't mind going a certain distance if we have to be true to ourselves, but the latter section is crossing a line just because we find it funny. The families get a couple of extra special bits in the show they'll see, so it all evens out.

Berit asked me yesterday what "this show" was "about." Since it IS a show, and therefore should have something going on underneath it. I guess if it's about anything other than getting us wed and sharing it with family, friends, and audiences, it's an "alternate look at romance, from among the non-romantic," or to generalize more, "there ARE other ways of doing these things." My productions more and more seem to be dealing with "the person who says no" as central, often-heroic figure -- the person or people who looks the status quo in the face and says, "I won't do that" (sometimes the shows are actually about the people who DO just go with the flow and are swept away in the tide to destruction, or at least stasis). I don't think this show is about it as some kind of heroic act, as it was with Ned Daley in World Gone Wrong or Grandier in the upcoming Devils, just one more restatement of the theme, "there ARE other ways."

Meanwhile, more and more of the cast I wanted to do Devils and Spacemen from Space can't do it, and I'm going to have to hold major auditions to fill those shows. {sigh} NOT what I wanted for these productions -- they will be MUCH harder to do with people I haven't worked with before, and will take me more time to get the actors in the tone I need. Oh, well, so it goes.

And here's this week's Random Ten from the 2,981 in the "Brandnew Bag" playlist of unheard songs in the iPod (with associated video links):

1. "Laser Love" - T.Rex - History of T.Rex—The Singles Collection
2. "Smokestack Lightning (live 1964)" - The Yardbirds - Five Live
3. "Up In Her Room" - The Seeds - A Web Of Sound
4. "Rio Grande" - Brian Wilson - Brian Wilson
5. "The King & Queen Of America" - Eurythmics - Greatest Hits
6. "The End" - The Doors - The Doors
7. "Introduction" - The Texas Chainsaw Massacre - Cannibals-A-Go-Go!
8. "Can't Say Anything Nice" - The Ramones - Unreleased Tracks
9. "Did You See Me Coming?" - Pet Shop Boys - Yes
10. "Goldfinger" - Magazine - Maybe It's Right To Be Nervous Now: Real Life/Secondhand Daylight Era

And here's the full video playlist for the above songs (with only a substitution for the Brian Wilson track):

Don't have much in the way of good pix of the cats today, just this one of them on the couch . . .

But here's a favorite video from yesterday, of a tiny orange kitten scaring itself . . .

Yesterday, we took care of some of the bureaucracy we had to before next week's activities . . .

And we spent a few hours in downtown Brooklyn. it would have gone a lot faster, but apparently someone else named "Ian Hill" once applied for a marriage license, so they had to send a fax to another department and get one back be sure it wasn't me (does this happen to people with MUCH more common names?).

I was rather tired by the time we got back to the subway station, but it felt like a damned big step -- we have the document, now we just need to sign it with our officiant and witnesses and . . . that's it . . . we will be married.

Late on the usual post because I've been finishing up a heavy week's work lighting two shows.

Craven Monkey and the Mountain of Fury reopened at The Brick last week, but I had to relight the first two performances to work with a different plot, so I went back and spent two days reconstituting the normal Brick setup and re-relighting the show to bring it back to the original look I had for it in December (which I was quite happy with) along with some of the slight improvements I had made in version 2. I saw it again last night and it worked quite well.

Tonight, Rudolf II opened at Bohemian National Hall, and went quite well. It was a bit of a pain to light, given the layout of the show and what I had to work with, but it wound up being fine. It's by no means the first time I've had to light a show that plays on a thin long strip with the audience on both sides, but I still struggle to accomplish anything that makes me happy in that setup. There's still some rough edges -- most I can correct, but some not so much. Oh, well, it happens.

Tomorrow I get a day off, but the four or five things I want to fix in Craven Monkey are still nagging at me, so I may take a ride over to The Brick tomorrow to do that if I'm up for it. But I could use the rest.

It's been an odd week -- the work was long and tiring, yes, but more often obstacles would arise from someone or some organization doing something silly that made my job harder, but as I would be getting a good anger on, the problem would either vanish or a solution would appear that would be much better than any original plan, which was great, but would leave me with a big ball of unresolved anger and no place to put it. And having all that anger riding on you gets exhausting.

But all that's pretty much done, and it's on to the other work.

Meanwhile, back in the iPod, a Random Ten from out of 25,443 (with links to hear and/or see most of them on YouTube):

1. "The Art Of Everyday Communication Part 1" - The Light Footwork - One State Two State
2. "Man With A Gun" - Jerry Harrison - Casual Gods
3. "No One Knows My Plan" - They Might Be Giants - John Henry
4. "Lucky Day" - Tom Waits - The Black Rider
5. "Story Of Isaac" - Leonard Cohen - Songs From A Room
6. "Monster Man" - Soul Coughing - Mix Disk - Dad
7. "Skippy Is A Sissy" - Roy Gaines - Sin Alley, Vol. 1: Red Hot Rockabilly 1955 - 1962
8. "Got Love If You Want It (live 1964)" - The Yardbirds - Five Live
9. "Return Of The Rat" - Wipers - Wipers Box Set: Is This Real?
10. "Delia's Gone (original)" - Johnny Cash - Legend

And I have nothing new in the way of photos, but as for videos -- in honor of the recent announcement that Shout! Factory will be releasing the wonderful 1987 Max Headroom TV series on DVD, here's Max with Art of Noise, back when he seemed to be popping up everywhere:

A bizarre little spot from IHOP in 1969:

A local commercial that Berit and I fell for while up in Maine (we love local TV ads):

And the classic Apocalypse Pooh:

Back to rest . . .

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.

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 . . .

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 now I wait. Besides the 11 actors already "in" for my four shows this year, I've contacted another 26 for 38 parts, and thus far received back 10 "Yes" answers, 4 "No" answers, and 3 "Maybe, let's talk" answers, from 16 people (one person I asked to be in two shows said yes to one and no to the other). I need more answers before I can move on. I have most of the people for Spell, it seems - I could maybe start work on that, but I'm still short a reply from two people who would be crucial to the show, so . . . no go.

Ambersons, the earliest show coming up (June), is the problem, of course. I did the breakdown and discovered there was no way to do the show with fewer than 20 actors (plus myself narrating). That's 4 more than I'd hoped, but it just won't work out any other way (and I wound up needing more men than I thought, always a pain). I have four people set, as mentioned before, and I've gotten only one "Yes" and two "Maybes" thus far on the positive side. And I've gotten three "No" responses too, in parts where I don't have many good options for casting among the tribe I work with, if any. If I don't get it cast soon and get some first things done before the end of the month, with some of the conflicts coming up on the people already cast, I won't be able to start real work on this until maybe April. I want a cast and first reading by the end of THIS month, dammit (I WANTED it by the end of January, but that didn't happen).

I have plenty to do for other people to fill time, but I want to be working on these shows, now. This week, Berit and I spent some time driving around getting props for the UTC#61 shows, which was alternately fun and annoying (I had to circle several blocks in Midtown for over an hour - the place in the world I like driving least). I have to schlep some video equipment around for a shoot for one of those shows the next two days. There looks to maybe be a cleanup day at The Brick tomorrow, which I should go and help at. Sunday, if the video schlepping doesn't get in the way, I should go and see a runthru of Penny Dreadful episode 4 at The Brick, as it's going to be a pain to light with the current setup and I'm going to have to do a lot more specifically for this one instead of just using the house plot.

Today, I'm interviewing Jon Stancato of Stolen Chair Theatre Company for a 30-minute radio profile on WPS1 Art Radio (taped for later "airing" - I'll let you know when it's up). Jon asked me if I'd do this, as he preferred the idea of the interview being more of a discussion between two theatre artists rather than the normal Q&A, despite my only knowing Stolen Chair's work from Kill Me Like You Mean It (which I loved), and reading the script for The Man Who Laughs (ditto) in one of Martin Denton's collections. This should be an enjoyable time, if a hair nerve-inducing.

So, in the meantime, let's check out the first random 10 from the iPod's 23,414:

1. "Batman Pows The Penguin - or - (Aha, My Fine Feathered Finks!)" - Nelson Riddle - Batman - Exclusive Original Television Soundtrack Album
2. "Sound and Vision" - David Bowie - Low
3. "Speed Car" - Claude Perraudin - Patchwork Library Addendum
4. "Elube" - De Ndirande Pitch Crooners - Culture Shock: Doug Schulkind's 2004 Marathon Premium
5. "Driving Me Crazy" - The Sleepless Knights - Trip in Tyme volume 1
6. "Newspapers" - Stan Ridgway - Mosquitos
7. "I Can't Sleep" - Quik - Psychedalia: Rare Blooms from the English Summer of Love
8. "Scene Pathétique" - Bernard Herrmann - The Magnificent Ambersons: Bernard Herrmann Anthology Volume 1
9. "Rock & Roll" - The Singing Dogs - Las Vegas Grind! - Volume 1
10. "My Heart Gets All the Breaks" - Wanda Jackson - You'll Always Have My Love

Hooker went to the vet twice this week because he was acting odd. Once we'd gone, of course, he started acting fine again. He may have simply been constipated and gassy, we're told. They love him at the vet's, but he was badly behaved this time (which was also suspicious, as he usually doesn't mind going, and he hissed and growled which he NEVER does - he was apparently just uncomfortable). They had to sedate him so they could get a clean x-ray, and he was quite adorable as he was stoned out of his gourd, just a big floppy lump. When we got him home, it hadn't quite worn off, and it was sadly cute to watch him stumble around with his back legs not quite working yet. He's already acting cheerier, and they gave us some kitty laxative.

In any case, here's the little bastard a couple of weeks ago:

And Moni has been preferring to drink from the faucet these days . . .

Maybe more later . . . I have other things to handle during the brief time I have on this computer -- oh, that's right, did I mention that the computer I usually use has died? It was an old nasty PC that could barely do much anyway (it was a gift from someone otherwise throwing it away, and much appreciated), but now the only working computer in the house is B's iMac, which has to be . . . shared. So instead of having a computer always on and ready to answer emails, etc., I'm on for a few hours in the morning, and another hour in the evening. Great.

I have lots of links and videos saved up to share, but . . . later . . .

In the midst of one of those wait-until-you-have-to-rush times as Berit and I prepare for regular running of Tanya Khordoc and Barry Weil's Secrets History Remembered at The Brick - Berit's running lights and sound, I'm running powerpoint/video. Berit's a lot more busy right now as she's sewing some costumes for it as well. Rehearsal tomorrow, tech begins Sunday for a coupel of days. The show looks to be great.

I went and saw a so-so show last night as part of my New York Innovative Theatre Awards judging responsibilities - can't say which, of course. More of an annoying show -- most of it not bad, not good, kinda average, with scattered moments of both incredible beauty/brilliance and incredible clumsiness/obviousness. Which makes it hard to judge many of the elements on a scale of 1-100, as I had to. I'd like to try and remember and be kind just to those fine moments of the show, but . . . it doesn't work that way. The two lead actors were excellent and had incredible chemistry, so I did well by them, I think.

Berit looks to have been up most of the night working, and has left a note for me to wake her up at noon, so I guess she still has a lot of work to do (I see an unfinished Red Bull in the fridge). I'm waiting for word from Barry and Tanya about going and buying them a monitor for the show, and just beginning to prepare for the show I'm directing in The Baby Jesus One-Act Festival. I'm doing a play by Marc Spitz that is very very funny (of course) and involves obscure music geekery (double of course) called "Marshmallow World," and to say anything more than that would be spoilerrific.

And speaking of obscure music geekery, my 80GB iPod now has 20,876 songs in it and is down to 10MB left in it - maybe 2 songs worth of storage. Every morning I cut more unnecessary stuff from it, and then add more "necessary" stuff. Here's 10 of what seems necessary, randomly, this morning:

1. "A Drunk in My Past" - X - More Fun In The New World
2. "Song X" - Sand in the Face - Sand In The Face
3. "I'll Give It Five" - Janice Nicholls - Beat of the Pops 07
4. "Best Days" - The Svengalis
5. "I'm Paying Taxes, What Am I Buying" - Fred Wesley & The J.B.'s - James Brown's Funky People (part 2)
6. "King Ink" - The Birthday Party - Prayers on Fire
7. "Beautiful" - Elvis Costello - House M.D. soundtrack
8. "Oh My Soul" - Johnny Otis - Let's Live It Up
9. "Get It Together" - James Brown - Star Time
10. "I Want to Wake Up" - Pet Shop Boys - Actually

I've been organizing things for The Brick with these companies going in and out, but I've been avoiding the place maybe more than I should this past week - I needed a little more time away between the clowns and Secrets, I think, than I was getting. I didn't see the Pig Iron show there last weekend, and I still don't know if I'm going to see The Debate Society's show there tonight or tomorrow. I should.

Actor-collaborator Walter Brandes ribbed me a bit when he came to see Bryan Enk's The Crow: Final, about my lighting that show and simultaneously working on the Clown Fest and directing Ten Nights in a Bar-Room, saying that he knew I couldn't actually take the rest of the year off from theatre and rest as I said I would (I guess I said it here, or maybe personally to Walter) after August. I actually had seen these varied gigs as a "rest" and "taking some time off" after the whammy of Ian W. Hill's Hamlet and the four August shows. A collection of amuses-bouche prior to digging into a big meal in 2008. However, too many of these little morsels can fill the stomach and ruin the appetite. So, some rest. Take it easy. More big things in 2008.