CollisionWorks

This is the journal of Ian W. Hill. I make theatre, and sometimes other things. You can find out lots more about me at my profile, but I needed this placeholder, post-dated entry up here until I figure out a few technical issues.

Hope I remain worth reading.

Slow week of not much to report, or rather much the same -- writing on Devils and Wedding (Spacemen didn't have anything new happen this week), some small jobs to handle at The Brick, some personal errands to run and things to get done for the Wedding-Production itself.

I can tell already that while things are slow right now, this year is going to be a killer snowball picking up speed and inertia as it rolls. I keep wanting to jump ahead about two months and GET TO THINGS, but I need all this boring slog time to prepare everything that needs careful, thought-out, detailed work this year.

For fun "other" work, I'm going back to working on improvised theatre/video with David Finkelstein tomorrow and working with Marc Spitz on one or two new plays he's got going that need some work and feedback.

So I work and blast music. Here's a morning Random Ten from the iPod (with associated links -- you can hear more of these actual songs than usual today!):

1. "Giving Up" - Julie Grant - Count On Me! (The Complete Pye Sessions)
2. "Saut Crapaud" - Columbus Fruge - Anthology Of American Folk Music, Vol. 2A: Social Music
3. "Girls" - Iggy Pop - New Values
4. "Can Your Pussy Do The Dog?" - The Cramps - A Date With Elvis
5. "Baltimore" - Five Chinese Brothers - Rig Rock Juke Box: A Collection of Diesel Only Records
6. "My Confusion" - The Elite - Back From The Grave 1
7. "Wham Bam Thank You Ma’am" - Charles Mingus - Oh Yeah
8. "Sucked Out" - Superdrag - Regretfully Yours
9. "My Favorite Song" - The Kay Gees - Keep On Bumpin' & Master Plan
10. "Give It Back (live)" - The Dickies - Locked 'N' Loaded

And some new cat images this week - one each of the monsters. Here's Hooker in a new favorite place, a useless old tweed jacket of mine in front of the radiator:

Meanwhile, Moni keeps trying to get Berit's attention when B's playing with her new iPod Touch by standing on B's chest and licking her face:

As we were going to bed late Saturday night (rather, early Sunday morning), we became concerned about a growing smell of smoke in the apartment. It just got worse and worse and was obviously coming from outside. Eventually we looked out the tiny bathroom window and saw the entire area was covered in thick black smoke. As the wind blew it around, it became apparent is was coming from a couple of blocks north, but apart from that, we couldn't tell what was aflame -- and it lasted a couple of hours.

The next day I went out to check and found it was the hardware store and deli up that block that we go to. Apparently the fire started in the hardware store . . .

And since the deli is cradled in the "L" of the hardware store, it was a goner, too.

A pity -- we weren't so fond of that hardware store, but it was at least convenient, especially since the hardware store we much preferred ALSO burned down some time ago (photo here last week). The deli was the nearest 24-hour one, and a good place to stop on the way home from rehearsals or shows to pick up needed groceries. And the guys there were nice and always remembered us (and if either of us came in solo, would ask about the other). The building will have to come down, I'm sure. I better get up there soon to get a picture of the Vaughn Bode-influenced graffiti mural on the side that looks to have been there since the 70s., though that'll be hard now that they've walled in the whole place.

Meanwhile, I go out for walks every night and take pictures of my neighborhood, mainly interested in light, and signs, like here on Avenue U:

As I walk during "magic hour," the sky, and the geometry of humanity against it, has become the most interesting thing for me:

As well as any old or unusual signs I can find:

Time to get myself and go out earlier today so I can do the shopping at the local supermarket (Kosher Corner) before it closes for Shabbos. There's supposedly a storm on the way. Better stock up . . .

Well, we've been back home for most of this week, and as I'd hoped (and often happens), I was able to get into a productive, creative rhythm up in Maine that I'm continuing here at home.

I hope we get to go back up again for another week or two when things free up here (Berit's stage-managing a show right now), which won't be for a while. Fine by me, as I was reminded why January isn't necessarily the best time to visit Maine:

Actually, that's glib -- the snow was light and lovely, and we were warm and toasty inside. Except for the time when I had to go out driving in a snowstorm as we were out of food -- I had been waiting for the snow to stop for two days so I could go out, and it didn't. Luckily, they know how to keep roads clear in snow up there.

So I worked on the three scripts, but not as much as I'd hoped on Spacemen and Wedding. Got a good deal done on Devils though, with some help from the loaner cat we spoil up there, Bappers:

Back home in Gravesend, I spread out all the cards I made up, breaking down the scenes and bits I want to use from the three versions of the Devils of Loudon story and try to find a structure that works for the production I want to do:

And again, help from a feline is appreciated. Here, I'm asking Hooker if I should have either three or four exorcism scenes, with the last causing some massive chaos so Act One will have a real big finale . . .

And every day, in the late afternoon, I take a break from the script work and take a walk. It helps me get up and DO this if I take the camera and think of it as "Picture Time," so I've been getting some nice images of the Gravesend/Bensonhurst/Sheepshead Bay area in which we live. It's not Art, but it keeps my eyes engaged, energized, and happy.

Sometimes I shoot because I like the light:

(above, Avenue R; below, Avenue S)

I've always been fond of the contrast between fading natural light and rising artificial light:

And sometimes I'm just documenting the features of the neighborhood that I like. Such as the actual still-operating porno theatre attended by some of the Orthodox Jewish gentlemen in the neighborhood, across from the Kosher candy store with the unfortunate typography (I think it's supposed to be "Kandi KING," but the candy piece standing in for the final "I" makes me think the place has something to do with rampaging giant apes):

This one below used to be the best hardware store within walking distance of home. Berit used to get lots of supplies, and found many other useful items, for our shows here. One night we drove past and it was surrounded by fire trucks, with huge flames and clouds of black smoke pouring from the roof and every crack. The next day they had the sign up on the smoldering building (the NEXT DAY, a PROFESSIONALLY-PRINTED sign! that's industry!) saying they be back, but that was at least 2 years ago, so I don't think we'll see them again.

We also were, at first, a little weirded out by the "MIKVEH ON PREMISES" sign. At a HARDWARE store? I've since seen the same sign at a hardware store up on 18th Avenue, and that's a much less Orthodox neighborhood than ours, but really?

I guess if you're out, and you need a mikveh, hey, why not? Hardware Store. Sure.

So work proceeds. I may have gotten the lucky break I was looking for in writing the Wedding when we stayed in Mattapoissett with Berit's parents for a night on the way back from Maine. They had gotten a kinda-cheesy, but still actually helpful, book from the library that was to help brides prepare for their wedding, and some of the text, and Berit's reactions to it, were nicely theatrical. Something I can use.

And the music keeps playing while I work. When I work in giant blocks of time for many days in a row, I like to listen to HUGE playlists containing the entire (or almost-entire) recorded work of a favorite artist, in chronological order or recording -- for some reason, it keeps me going and gives me . . . continuity?

Thus far, I've recently made it the complete works of Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen (with a break at 1979 for The Monkees; there's only SO much Cohen one can take in a row), and we're currently up to 1985 with The Rolling Stones (and THIS is a depressing playlist, ultimately, but I'm determined to go all the way to the bitter end). Berit is VERY patient. Maybe next I'll go for The Velvet Underground, which will be much kinder to her (as long as it's not Beefheart, Zappa, The Residents, or Elvis Costello, she should be fine).

But right now, a break from the decline of the Glimmer Twins to do a Random Ten from the 25,435 on the iPod, with associated links, where available:

1. "Blue Law" - Filth - Split 7" EP
2. "Boomada" - Les Baxter & His Orchestra - Swing For A Crime
3. "Let's Find Out" - Armando Trovaioli (feat. Isabel Bond) - Beat at Cinecittà Vol.3
4. "Dirty Love" - Mandre - Mandre
5. "Beautiful New Born Child" - Eric Burdon & War - The Black-Man's Burdon
6. "Pat's Song" - The Peppermint Trolley Company - Fading Yellow volume 7
7. "Baby Blue" - The Groop - Woman You're Breaking Me
8. "Ando Meio Desligado" - Os Mutantes - A Divina Comédia Ou Ando Meio Desligado
9. "Guess Things Happen That Way" - Johnny Cash - The Complete Sun Singles: Volume 3
10. "Almost Black, Pt. 1" - James White & The Blacks - Off White

You already got some cat photos for today, but here's another of a crazed Hooker trying to eat his own tail in Berit's lap:

Okay, back to work. Now I have to go through the Aldous Huxley Devils of Loudon book pulling out anything I want to use in the show that Whiting didn't use in his play or Russell in the movie.

Maine continues to be a fruitful place for me to work. Haven't gotten as much done as I'd hoped, but that's always the case up here -- and often I'm able to keep the creative juices and rhythm and work schedule going even when I get back to NYC. Wish I'd been able to spend another week up here, but there are things we need to handle back home.

I have transcribed the entirety of John Whiting's play version of The Devils, as I do with almost every play I direct, even if I'm not going to be messing with the text as much as I'm planning to on this occasion -- I like to feel the text go through my fingers; I get closer to it and get a basic physical feeling for he movement of the prose, and I can create a "director's draft" that specifically fits the play into the theatre space I'm doing it in. I've also broken the play down scene-by-scene (or beat-by-beat) on index cards, and then done the same with Ken Russell's film of the play, from which I also intend to draw in my production -- Russell, smartly, made his film both from the play and the play's source material, Aldous Huxley's The Devils of Loudon, which I'm also grabbing bits from.

The play is good, but at times a bit dated and heavy-handed, and the film improves it in a number of ways that I can't let go of. At the same time, some of Russell's improvements won't work at all on stage. So a new combination of the two (with Huxley helping out) is what I'm trying to assemble. As the two have some very different ways of advancing the plot -- which often can't be combined -- I have to shuffle and lay out the index cards until I get an order of events that makes sense and is dramatically interesting.

I hope I can make it work in a two-act structure. I don't mind long plays as much as everyone else does these days it seems, and this will be a . . . sizable . . . work. Still, I'd rather keep it to one intermission -- Whiting's play has two, and, unfortunately, at least in his version, that three-act structure makes sense. Well, if it the play winds up wanting it, it wants it, and I can't argue with what the play wants. I'm here to serve it.

Of course, if I don't get the rights, all this work will be wasted. They're easy enough to get, it seems, I just need to do a donation-request email to my list to try and get the money to pay for those rights ASAP. Yeah, there's a reason that out of the 75 shows I've directed only 4 have been from later 20th-Century playwrights where I had to pay the standard amount for the rights (for the Ionesco, Havel, and Fassbinder shows -- and thank you Richard Foreman and Clive Barker for requiring a tiny or non-existent payment for the rights to your plays). Considering that, I probably shouldn't be concentrating on this show as much as I am right now, but it's the one that's burning right now, and I've learned to go as much as possible with the show that's demanding the work. Even if that show's in August and another show, and probably the MOST IMPORTANT SHOW I will ever write/direct, is coming up in June . . .

So I've spent a little time -- not as much as I should, but all I could give right now -- to writing Berit's and my marriage. Still VERY rough. Just ideas and some language here and there. This one seems to need me to walk around for a bit, thinking, and then quickly write down ideas in longhand in my notebook. Somehow, from these fragments of speech and image that come to me, I'll wind up with the production. Work on this might actually be better at home. I keep getting the feeling that I just need to stumble onto that ONE THING, that structural element or music cue or whatever, and the whole thing will crack open wide for me. Some shows are like that.

As for Spacemen from Space, B & I rewatched 6 full 12-episode serials from the '30s and '40s, and even while I worked on The Devils, I kept taking notes on plot and character and dialogue styles and elements to get the feel of those stories down. I have an outline for what needs to happen in each of the six "episodes" that make up this two-act play, I just need to get into the right mindspace to write it, or what I write will wind up just being a good imitation of those serials rather than what I want, which is a satiric, comic pastiche of them (with an underlying "statement" for those who wish to look for one that dovetails nicely with The Devils).

And as for today's normal thing, here's a neat little Random Ten from the 25,435 tracks in the iPod -- I really REALLY thought I was going to find video links for all of the actual tracks this week, but the obscure Sun Records side at #8 blew that, and the really obscure Illinois 1960s garage band at #9 only had a different song available. Ah, well, you get a pretty good mix here, if you follow the videos . . .

1. "Seven Years In Tibet" - David Bowie - Earthling
2. "He Hit Me (It Felt Like a Kiss)" - Grizzly Bear - unknown download
3. "I Can Only Give You Everything" - Little Boy Blues - Pebbles Volume 2 - Various Hooligans
4. "Blood Makes Noise" - Suzanne Vega - 99.9 F
5. "Money Changes Everything" - The Brains - The Brains
6. "All The Young Dudes" - Mott The Hoople - All The Young Dudes
7. "I'm A Greedy Man" - James Brown - Star Time
8. "Hey Now (take 1)" - Billy Love - Sun Records: The Blues Years 1950-1958 vol. 7
9. "Now She's Crying" - The M.H. Royals - Total Raunch - 100% Boss Garage From The Sixties
10. "Done Me Wrong All Right" - Sweet - Funny Funny How Sweet Co-Co Can Be

And though I've been enjoying taking pictures up here, I did indeed forget to bring the cable to connect it to the computer, so I'll share those when I'm back home.

Here's a little video I found because lord_whimsy posted another video from this same series. He went with the best (and longest), so I advise following the link to that one. Here's another "MANDOM" ad from Japan, 1970, featuring Mr. Charles Bronson (and in this one, his 18-year-old son, Tony):

And I've posted this before, but I had to find it to show someone this morning, and it made me laugh all over again, so here's a replay of what Joe Cocker was REALLY singing at Woodstock:

Birthday Greetings from Joe Cocker

Regina | MySpace Video

(and yes . . . if you're reading this on Facebook you won't see the videos and will have to go to my LiveJournal to do so . . .)

Okay, back to shuffling index cards while C.S.I. plays incessantly in the background . . .

Oh god, this became long and rambly . . . sorry, had to get it all out . . .

So here I am in Maine, trying to work on the scripts for my three planned shows this year -- Spacemen from Space, The Devils (of Loudon), and, most importantly, The Wedding of Ian W. Hill & Berit Johnson: A Theatrical Study -- and getting far too distracted from my work by something that I'm realizing has less and less application to me and that work: the theatrical blogosphere's ongoing discussion of Outrageous Fortune: The Life and Times of the New American Play, a book from TDF (the Theatre Development Fund), which outlines the sorry state of American Theater . . . or at least, the sorry state at certain levels of American Theater as it exists now. I have not read the book, and as, from what I'm reading, it doesn't apply to my work as it stands, I probably won't.

The most central locale for discussion on this is at Isaac Butler's Parabasis, in both the posts and, maybe more importantly, in the comments. Isaac has organized a blog-thru with 8 bloggers going through the book chapter-by-chapter and discussing it. Other bloggers have joined in and are having their say. Besides the discussion at Isaac's, the most interesting thoughts, in posts and comments, are at J. Holtham's 99 Seats. Several other bloggers have had fewer posts, but been quite enlightening, including Garrett Eisler, August Schulenburg, and Travis Bedard.

A secondary, but connected, discussion regarding some figures from TCG (Theatre Communications Group) on the most produced plays of the past 10 years has also been going on, and is somewhat interesting -- purely theoretical, again, to me, as these plays have little to do with where I work or what I'm interested in; perhaps this discussion is most interesting in having revealed some nauseating attitudes from Mainstream Theater Critics, who say that not enough classical plays are being done, and that this is because Modern American Actors can't handle them. Aw, Jesus fuck a bagpipe, I'm not goin' there.

However, the blogger dealing with all of these discussions who is basically saying everything I would is fellow Indie Traveler Matthew Freeman (also, while not part of this discussion, James Comtois's series of posts, "Little Jimmy's Guide to Self-Producing," dovetails nicely with it; Josh Conkel also has a similar opinion to Matt's and mine, stated briefly, and noting his appropriate concern with some more truly important things in this world). Basically, for some of us theatre artists, the Institutional Theatre World being discussed in these studies is at a level above that connects with us barely at all. This level is, it would seem, IN TROUBLE.

Now, anything that means TROUBLE to Theatre in any way hurts. I've had people who wanted me to snicker with them when a theatre space whose management I despised would go under, but the loss of ANY theatre space is a stab in the heart to me, and I won't celebrate the closing of one. The Troubles being discussed now, however (and go to the other blogs to see what they are in real detail, please), are the same ones we've been hearing about for years -- now with some good organization and data and a nice binding to back up the anecdotes -- and, again, ones that touch my Indie Theatre world barely a whit. Professor Scott Walters, in response to Matthew saying something similar, refers to this as an "I Got Mine" attitude -- I see it as a "We worked for it and continue to work to barely KEEP it, and hell, we SHARE it, gladly, and you could too if you paid attention" attitude. Scott has many many good and useful things to say on the Art, but he continually harps on things that, to his knowledge, don't exist or that theatre artists should be doing that are old hat to many of us who have been doing this for years (and it has been 20 years now for me since my first Indie NYC shows).

I worked at (and lived in the basement of) NADA on Ludlow Street for almost 4 years during a time that went from boom to bust for the space. The boom period was responsible for creating FringeNYC, the bust for the scattering of the Lower East Side theatre scene that had built up from around 1988-2000. Indie Theatre will probably never have as strong a united front in NYC as it did at that period, when there was such a strong geographical center to it, but -- and in a strange way possibly BECAUSE of the splintering of that Indie scene -- the past 10 years have certainly seen a slow regrouping, with stronger spaces, more exciting and diverse new work, and (most importantly for the survival of the spaces and the art) audiences and media more aware and respectful of our existence. Indie Theatre NYC is in a GOOD place right now. Not a GREAT one, no, things could always be better, and while awareness of us is better we are still not as much part of the City's landscape as we deserve to be. It's improving steadily, though, maybe not even so much because we're getting so rapidly better at our work, but because the more institutionalized branch of it isn't.

Apparently, Institutional Theatre is growing more stale, more inbred, more interested in development than production, is losing its audience as the current one dies off and no younger one is replacing it, is a place where being daring is discouraged, no one is doing the kind of work they WANT to be doing, and no one can make a decent living. Apart from the last item in that list, the opposite is true in the Indie Theatre world that I live in along with several hundred people that I know personally, and many thousands I don't.

Sure, many many MANY of the people in this world want and/or expect (and certainly deserve) to be getting by financially from their Theatre work, will never be able to, and won't be (or, to get other things important to them in this world, CAN'T be) satisfied with that. I've seen several dozen exceptionally talented actors, playwrights, and directors realize they were never going to make the living they wanted to in Theatre, and leave it. Yes, it can be heartbreaking.

Basically, in Theatre, as Matt Freeman pretty much says, you can either do what you want to, and almost certainly not make a living at it, or you can try to do something that might make you a living (but probably won't) that you very likely won't be happy with and may not even wind up in front of an audience. If you're lucky, you're able to get a job or series of gigs in the latter category that allows you the time, energy, and freedom to do the former. More and more of my friends have been able to do this (I need to get on the bandwagon myself and be more organized in getting more craft/skill gigs to pay for my Art work).

So if working in Theatre is going to be a financially-unrewarding struggle at any level you work in (unless you win the lottery with a real success -- as Arthur Miller said, "You can't make a living in Theatre but you can make a killing"), why not do the work you want to in an area that is uncalcified and, at least where I and my collaborators are, growing? The discussion just makes me feel like I'm in a good place right now.

And I don't just mean a good place in my career, but a very literal good place: The Brick, a home for my work, where, as Technical Director, I can also pursue the calling I found at NADA of making sure as much worthwhile theatre work by other artists is produced at as professional a level as I can. Like all non-profit theatres, we could use more grants, donations, ticket sales -- basically, money -- not so much even to grow or be more secure (though that would be nice) but just to keep the physical space and equipment in good working order. However, we're doing better and better in that regard -- 2009 was our best year yet, financially, by far.

And -- looking at some numbers -- what kind of work gave us this very good year? 51 productions (ranging from multi-week runs to one-night events) of which 44 were brand-new, premiere works. Of the rest, there were 4 adaptations of Classical Texts (Greeks through Chekhov -- three of which were so "adapted" as to be almost brand-new plays) and 3 later 20th-Century revivals (all ones I directed). Besides the four productions I created, I was privileged to work closely on 12 other shows, including doing light design for 10 of them (and as Tech Director, I had to work with ALL of them in some way). In fact, at least one of the "productions" I'm listing was an evening of 7 fully-produced one-acts, so the real number is a bit bigger. And we had audiences. We could have more, of course (my own four shows, which did "very well," still had less than 50% of the possible seats filled in total on all but one), but we definitely seem to be on an upward swing.

And this past year, in our little theatre, I've been lucky enough to work with and see plays premiered from contemporaries I know and admire like Bryan Enk & Matt Gray (Third Lows), Eric Bland (Old Kent Road), Richard Lovejoy (Sneaky Snake), Audrey Crabtree & Lynn Berg (Ten Directions), Matthew Freeman (Blue Coyote), James Comtois & Pete Boisvert (Nosedive), Gyda Arber & Aaron Baker (Fifth Wall), Tim Cusack & Jason Jacobs with Stan Richardson (Theatre Askew), Eddie Kim, David Finkelstein (Lake Ivan), Happy Hour, Horse Trade, Frank Cwiklik & Michele Schlossberg (DMTheatrics), Hope Cartelli & Jeff Lewonczyk (Piper McKenzie), Michael Gardner (The Brick, itself), and fight choreography from Qui Nguyen (Vampire Cowboys).

AND . . . I got to know and admire artists I hadn't known previously, like Anna Q. Jones (Bone Orchard), Nick Jones, Rachel Shukert & Peter J. Cook (Terrible Baby), Leah Winkler & Emily Baines (Everywhere Theatre Group), Marc Bovino & Joe Curnutte (The Mad Ones), Youngblood, Patrick Harrison (Depth Charge), and Cat Fight Productions.

PHEW!

And this is just mentioning the creators who worked this year in our place -- not even mentioning the dozens of terrific actors I've seen or directed in these shows (nor any great Indie Theatre I've seen elsewhere this year -- Tom X. Chao, Stolen Chair, whatever). And I'm sure I'm leaving some out. Oh, right, I directed a fun farce by Trav S.D. at Theatre for the New City as well -- a bit outside the real Indie Theatre community, somewhat, but still part of the style.

So . . . honestly, a theatrical community that includes, in one year, all of the above (and, for that matter, my OWN work), is not one I feel is exactly unhealthy, at least creatively. No, none of the above are making a living from their work -- that may be a crime, it may not; I wish we all were. I don't think very many of these artists, as successful as some shows might be, are exactly going to create work that will cross over to a mass audience and sell the tickets that make the profits (though one can always stumble upon the right show in the right place at the right time and find yourself with a Urinetown, but you can't predict or plan that, despite the many groups that try every year at FringeNYC).

Still, I wouldn't be surprised in the least, actually, if Freeman or Comtois or Bland or Lovejoy or Nguyen, or Mac Rogers for that matter (and I wish we had something of HIS at The Brick!), stumbled upon the play that crossed over and had that kind of success -- but I sure don't think it would happen for Matt or James or Eric or Richard or Qui or Mac by TRYING to play the game and go the Institutional route. If it happens it will be because they are working and pushing things forward in the Indie world, and the "right person" sees it and is able to help it in the other.

In any case, one of my projects for the coming year is to try and find some grant money that can't go towards play production, but could possibly go towards publishing, as I really, really want to create a GCW imprint that could put out a series of anthologies: Plays from The Brick, featuring work by many of the above artists (all shows that premiered at the space). Published texts aren't plays, of course (as a symphony conductor said of a Mahler score -- as opposed to an actual performance -- "It's a theory"), but it would be a Good Thing if we could share some of what we do at The Brick with a world outside NYC Indie Theatre.

Okay -- been working on this too long, and am too tired and rambling. I will be following the discussion of Outrageous Fortune with some interest -- as I'm following the whole Leno/O'Brien thing, despite not watching or having any interest in either of their shows, because the discussion of the conflict is more interesting to me than the business-as-usual. But probably, if I feel like joining in, it will just be a sign to close the browser and re-open Word and go back to getting my own shows written.

Some people may see their "fortune" as cursed, as in the stars, and bemoan it, and some people just choose to ignore the prophets, roll up their sleeves, and go ahead. The work is all.

I've been writing my regular weekly post for many hours now -- as it became hideously long -- and didn't get my normal Friday post in on the usual day. Also, that post is so long, I've decided to hack off the smaller ending and post it first. So, here's the normal stuff. Giant rambly Theatre post to follow . . .

And, back in the CLEAN world, here's what came up in today's Random Ten from the iPod (with links to the songs or associated work by the artist where available):

1. "I Wish" - The Platters - The Magic Touch: An Anthology
2. "The Loved Ones" - Elvis Costello & The Attractions - Imperial Bedroom
3. "Twenty Nine Ways (To My Baby's Door)" - Koko Taylor - What It Takes: The Chess Years
4. "Flag Night" - The Passage - For All And None
5. "I've Been Everywhere" - Johnny Cash - American II: Unchained
6. "Sun Kissed Chicks" - Jean-Jacques Debout - The Music Library by Jonny Trunk
7. "Disguises" - Minutemen - The Punch Line
8. "Naval Aviation In Art (quad version)" - Frank Zappa - QuAUDIOPHILIAc
9. "The Friendly Hopefuls Salute The Punks of 76" - The Friendly Hopefuls - Obey The New Wave (1980 and all that - UK DIY, etc)
10. "Cruising For Burgers (live 1971)" - Frank Zappa & The Mothers Of Invention - Freaks & Motherfuckers

No cat photos -- not only because we're up in Maine (as I would have taken shots of our loaner dog and cat up here), but because I apparently forgot to bring the cable to connect the camera to the computer (D'OH!). Maybe it's in a bag I haven't looked in.

Instead, as we're away from home, some shots from a walk around that home neighborhood, or rather, a bit to the West, into Bensonhurst, where you can still find Scary Santa, with dead eyes and evil claws:

And Denzel wants some Dunkin' Donuts, to go:

And next to an Acupuncture joint, you can find a "Tax Service" center that doubles as the "Universal Light Center for Cosmic Awareness":

And there, off in the distance at the Kings Highway stop, BLANK:

Okay, too much time writing this thing [which I've mostly hacked off and will follow], and not enough on the playscripts. I'm really just avoiding the most boring parts of writing right now -- the opening pulling apart and outlining and so forth.

Missed my weekly Friday posts the last two weeks -- one day was Christmas, and the other was a strangely-frenetic January 1 (usually a day for NOTHING), though I got that "Favorite Movies of the Decade" post in, but I'd been working on that all day off-and-on on Dec. 31.

I've been recharging, planning out some of next year's shows, and wondering what I have to say here. I've absented myself from a lot of the theatrical discussions this blog was originally created to address, in part. And I'm aware no one reads me here much anymore, anyway (my Facebook presence has become far more active and taking up more time).

The conversation in the theatrical blogosphere has gotten both more interesting and more frustrating to me, as the issues discussed have been both "coming closer to home" and also "non-essential" to me and my work. I have things to say in the discussion, but have to watch getting sidetracked into annoyance and invective -- obvious things are being belabored, stupid, untrue things are being stated as fact by people who don't know any better (and often should), and while good points about problems are being made, no one seems to have any constructive, solution-based ideas.

And in any case, I'm here and making theatre that I'm happy with and proud of, both my own and others that I help supervise at The Brick, so much of the discussion is entirely beside the point to me. Problem, what problem? We make theatre. We're here, and we're not going away, and we're getting bigger audiences and financial support constantly.

But I'll probably have something to say about the discussion (as much as within the discussion) soon -- I'm going up to Maine to work for a while in a while, and my longer thoughts on THEATRE always seem to occur while I'm up there recharging my batteries. In the meantime, the more interesting facets of the discussion are going on over at the blogs of Isaac Butler, Matthew Freeman, and the newly-non-pseudonymous J. Holtham. Many good thoughts there (and quite a few stupid ones, in the comments, at least).

And, back again, here's a Random Ten from the iPod for this week (with associated links):

1. "Ban Deodorant Spot" - The Repulsives - Psychedelic Promos & Radio Spots, vol. 6
2. "Don't Get Your Hopes Up" - Jacqueline Humbert - Dust
3. "Il Giorno Del Cobra" - Paolo Vasile - Roma Violenta: la Cinevox si incazza
4. "Afraid of Losing You" - Mashmakhan - CherryStones: Hidden Charms
5. "Decepticon" - Le Tigre - Mix Disk - Devon
6. "'I Got Dem Ol' Cosmic Blues Again' LP Ad" - Janis Joplin - Psychedelic Promos & Radio Spots, vol. 3
7. "We Got A Long Way To Go" - Stained Glass - Mindrocker 60's USA Punk Anthology Vol. 9
8. "Right On Jody" - Bobby Patterson - Devil's Blues - New Edition
9. "10. "Studio Blues" - Link Wray & The Wraymen - Walkin' With Link

Hey, we got a camera for Xmas to replace the stolen one! So we're back to cat pictures. Here's Moni upset with Berit for playing with her new iPod Touch instead of her:

Hooker curled up happy at Berit's feet:

And the two of them, quite happy on the couch:

Time to have my pre-show nap now (Ninja Cherry Orchard tonight). More soon. Really.

Ten years ago, at the end of 1999, I had been living off-and-on, and by that point, mostly on, in the basement of the NADA theatre on Ludlow Street. Theatre had become my life, but even then Film, which had pretty much been a total obsession since I was a small child, still clutched at me a bit. The 90s weren't such a great time for Film in any case. 1999 had a surprising number of really remarkable films, but before that . . . ugh.

So as I concentrated more on Theatre . . . film kinda vanished for me. There were certain directors I would always follow, and films of interest, but I watched fewer and fewer movies as the decade went on -- in the last three years I saw anywhere from 1 to 3 movies in a theater. During my NYU days, I would see up to 10 movies a WEEK in theaters, plus whatever I'd watch on video.

So I'd had a low opinion of Film in the '00s, but as I look over all of these "Best of the Decade" lists, I'm a bit stunned at how many good films there were, and how many I DID see (nothing compared to previous decades in my life, but better than I thought). So, looking the lists over, I decided to make up my own -- which first involved figuring out which films I actually saw during this time. After some research, I came up with a list of 228, and I ranked them all from most favorite to pond scum. I include the full list here for it's own odd purpose.

For years and years starting in 1971, first in Movietone News and then later in Film Comment magazine, which I grew up reading whenever I could get my hands on an issue, Richard T. Jameson and Kathleen Murphy would do a year-end wrap-up on Film called "Moments Out of Time," which I always looked forward to. They focused on those perfect moments in movies, which can occur in any and every film, even truly awful ones, where everything comes together in one of those especial transcendent moments unique to the medium -- my all-time favorite was when, in the midst of mentioning

The blog Parallax View has been reprinting the older pieces, and their 2009 list is online at MSN Entertainment. I recommend looking at them, they bring back lots of memories of some of the finer moments of those great years of film.

Today I'm going through several of my favorite 20 movies of the past 10 years, watching them either in their entirety, or in just fragments, reminding myself of those very same moments that make me still love movies.

Things to be watched for today:

Fragments of Mulholland Drive . . . the color of Diane Selwyn's kitchen . . . the amazing business Justin Theroux does with his cigarette as he hears the name of the actress he's been ordered to cast . . . the laugh of the suddenly-competent hit man when he is asked what his blue key unlocks . . . "The girl is still missing" leading to the sound of a telephone ring hanging endlessly in the air as poor doomed avatar Betty Elms is brought into Diane Selwyn's dream . . . and then the cruel way Betty is dispatched from the dream, removed from the frame (and existence) by a casual camera move, never to return . . . The Cowboy saying, "There's sometimes a buggy..." . . . the actual script supervisor of Lynch's film, as the keeper of the text, appears in it to close the book on Diane's pitiful life and get the last word . . . "Silencio."

In The New World . . . the opening, pre-credit ritual from Pocahontas that calls the film itself into being . . . the looks of discovery on both sides as they spot each other . . . the amazing final four minutes (almost to the second) as Pocahontas/Rebecca leaves her life by ducking playfully out of the frame as she plays with her child (the positive flip-side of what is done to Betty Elms), only to be reborn in Nature again with the appearance of a Native American spirit in her English home . . . the final moments, where the film joins with the endings of Apocalypse Now, Contempt, and Bad Timing in pulling away from all humanity to show how small and petty we and all our concerns are in the landscape of the natural world. There will always be the ocean, rivers, rain, trees.

INLAND EMPIRE . . . "BRUTAL fucking murder!" . . . Bucky Jay attempts to adjust a stage light . . . a woman (prostitute?) in a Poland hotel cries herself into the static of her TV, falling down the rabbit hole into a fantasy of herself as a beautiful blonde Hollywood actress, but still unable to escape her real life of murder and infidelity, as neither Laura Palmer, Fred Madison, nor Diane Selwyn could in their own dreams before her . . . "AXXoN N." . . . "Look at us and tell us if you've known us before" . . . Nikki Grace shrugging off the attentions of The Woman in White-figure who always represents peace and transcendence in Lynch films, as she still has unfinished business . . . The way the music and sound goes - counterintuitively - strangely and suddenly quiet and mournful during the terrifying finale around the appearance of the horrible face . . . And then Nikki, The Dreamself of the Heartbroken Woman, finally transcending into The Place Where All Stories Come From, a beautiful mansion filled with characters mentioned in this film, from past Lynch films (and maybe future ones?), and a man sawing logs, where there is always music in the air, and the women sing a pretty Nina Simone song.

Dear god . . . Speed Racer . . . an entire MOVIE that looks like molten hard candies and marbles and is the biggest, glossiest art film about movement, editing, and color I've ever seen, continuing the experiments Lucas started with THX-1138 but got sidetracked from by being convinced he needed more "emotion" in his films (I'm sure he wishes his Star Wars prequels were more like this film) . . . an exploration of how to turn the Stargate sequence from 2001: A Space Odyssey into a coherent storytelling system for narrative film, with car racing as metaphor for the artistic process.

Men (and a few women) doing their jobs in Zodiac -- writing, cartooning, codebreaking, investigating, fathering, editing, killing; the fascination of watching talented professionals do their jobs (compounded by the joy of watching highly skilled actors do their own perfectly modulated work) . . .

And so on . . . here's my top 20 for the decade, followed by a full ranked list of the remaining 208 films I saw these ten years:

I LOVED AND LOVE THESE MOVIES AND DON'T GIVE A DAMN WHAT, IF ANYTHING, MIGHT BE WRONG WITH THEM:

1. Mulholland Drive - David Lynch, U.S. 2001
2. Dogville - Lars von Trier, Denmark 2003
3. The New World - Terrence Malick, U.S. 2005
4. INLAND EMPIRE - David Lynch, U.S./France/Poland 2006
5. No Country for Old Men - Joel & Ethan Coen, U.S. 2007
6. Irreversible - Gaspar Noé, France 2002
7. Zodiac - David Fincher, U.S. 2007
8. I'm Not There - Todd Haynes, U.S./Germany 2007
9. Battle Royale - Kinji Fukasaku, Japan 2001
10. The Saddest Music in the World - Guy Maddin, Canada 2003
11. My Winnipeg - Guy Maddin, Canada 2007
12. The Royal Tenenbaums - Wes Anderson, U.S. 2001
13. There Will Be Blood - P. T. Anderson, U.S. 2007
14. Sin City - Frank Miller & Robert Rodriguez, U.S. 2005
15. Full Frontal - Steven Soderbergh, U.S. 2002
16. The Fog of War - Errol Morris, U.S. 2003
17. Synecdoche, New York - Charlie Kaufman, U.S. 2008
18. The Gleaners and I - Agnès Varda, France 2000
19. In the Mood for Love - Wong Kar Wai, Hong Kong 2000
20. Speed Racer - The Wachowski Brothers, U.S. 2008

( The Remaining 207 Movies I saw, 2000-2009 )

We are staying in tonight, and avoiding the craziness and unpleasant travel of New Year's Eve. We've watched Dogville, INLAND EMPIRE and Speed Racer in their entirety, and Zodiac is almost over. What next? I'm Not There? The Saddest Music in the World? Synecdoche, New York is also on the pile but, uh, I'm not so sure that's appropriate for what supposed to be a more happy evening.

And a happy new year to you and yours, friends.

This past week, the usual pre-holiday stuff -- some shows to run or see over the weekend, some attempted house-cleaning that will have to be rush-finished in the next week, some attempted present-shopping, ditto, and cleaning up of business from this year -- finances, tax letters to send to donors to the company, etc. etc. And the first ramping up of the shows and other productions for 2010.

A fun day on Sunday of four shows at The Brick -- as Berit and I each had to run board on one show each, and wanted to see the other two shows, we decided to make a day of it and enjoy Craven Monkey and the Mountain of Fury, The Ninja Cherry Orchard, Butterfly, Butterfly, Kill Kill Kill, and Deck the Hallmanns. Now THAT was a fine day at the theatre! Tonight I'm going back to see Craven Monkey at its final performance and run lights again for Ninja Cherry Orchard, and it seems that more than a few friends will be there to enjoy the double-bill. Fight Fest at The Brick seems to have gone over gangbusters, and I guess we'll be doing it again -- which means I need to think about and write Fat Man Fall Down for the next one.

Two more days of work (including a 9.30 am call tomorrow, oy), and that's it for theatre this year. As for next year, we'll be going away to Maine for (I hope) much of January to work on Spacemen from Space for August, and as for something to run in rep with that one (I'd love to try and do them with the same cast, too), I'm thinking of John Whiting's The Devils, which was based on The Devils of Loudon by Aldous Huxley and was made into the film of the same name by Ken Russell. The problem is that what I'd really like to do is a new stage piece that combines elements of all three materials: Whiting's play, Huxley's historical novel, and Russell's film. I'll have to check into the legality of that . . . also, I'm not sure, but I think David LM Mcintyre may have had the idea to do that first, and may still be interested in pursuing that, and I wouldn't want to step on his toes (of course, he's in L.A., so maybe we can take the idea each our own way on opposite coasts).

And of course, the MAIN show for next year: The Wedding of Ian W. Hill & Berit Johnson: A Theatre Study (or whatever we're going to call it). I have a few pages of writing for this in a notebook I can't find, and need to get back to that as well. Rather one of the most important shows I'll ever do, so I'd better get it right . . .

In the meantime, as always, here's a Random Ten from the 25,459 tracks currently in the iPod (with associated links -- and dammit, I REALLY thought I'd achieve my goal this week of finding ALL of the tracks on YouTube or somewhere online so you could listen to the exact same tracks that came up for me, but the Adverts track at #8 broke the streak . . . maybe some other time . . .):

1. "Ooh Baby, Baby" - The Miracles - Motown Greatest
2. "I Want To Hold Your Hand (mono 2009 remaster)" - The Beatles - Mono Masters, Vol. 1
3. "Funky Boss" - Beastie Boys - Check Your Head
4. "She Said" - Hasil Adkins - Born Bad - Volume 2
5. "The Gorilla" - The Shandells - Lux & Ivy's Favorites Volume 3
6. "Forever For Her (Is Over For Me)" - The White Stripes - Get Behind Me Satan
7. "My Novel Idea" - Tom X. Chao - Micro-Podcasts
8. "Newboys" - The Adverts - Crossing The Red Sea With The Adverts
9. "Come On" - Crispy Ambulance - Frozen Blood (1980-82)
10. "I Got A Right" - The Micronotz - Smash

Just read online that the writer/director/actor/etc. Dan O'Bannon died. There's a good obit/overview HERE and here's a favorite scene from his Dark Star:

And in the holiday spirit, Esther Silberstein passed on this fine rendition of "The Little Drummer Boy" by Michael Lynch:

Okay, nap time before a sizable evening of theatre now . . .

The Fight Fest is in full swing at The Brick, and is now what is taking up much of Berit's and my time, though now that it's open, the time is a bit more spread out, as the techs are mostly over, so usually B and I just have either one show to run or one house managing shift every day. I have to be here (and HERE at The Brick is where I am right now) tomorrow morning for a tech, but I think that (apart from a cabaret) that's the last tech of the Fest to be supervised.

Today, I'm here because a school in Greenpoint has rented the space out from 9 am to 3 pm so that several classes of 9th-grade students who have been creating scenes in class can come in and present them to each other in an actual theatrical setting. So I'm here as space monitor, which is fine (I get paid), except for not getting to sleep until 3 am last night (after opening Ninja Cherry Orchard, which was a lot of fun). Very tired. Nice to see the kids doing this theatre work -- granted, maybe only a third of them are at all interested, but they're doing it.

I am fighting to stay awake right now, so I can be a good monitor, and I could use some loud music in my ears, so here's another week's Random Ten out of 25,239 in the iPod, with links to some of the songs/artists:

1. "Eye Know" -- De La Soul -- 3 Feet High and Rising
2. "So Much (1967 version)" - Night Shadows -- The Psychedelic Years
3. "319" -- Prince -- The Dawn - Act 2
4. "You! Me! Dancing!" -- Los Campesinos! -- Hold On Now Youngster
5. "Will She Meet the Train in the Rain?" -- Greg Perry -- One for the Road
6. "Exile" - Enya -- Watermark
7. "Sun Kissed Chicks" -- Jean-Jacques Debout -- The Music Library by Jonny Trunk
8. "Cool" - TOKIO -- News
9. "Need a Little Lovin'" -- Dean Carter -- Pebbles volume 6 - Chicago 1
10. "I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine" -- Bob Dylan -- John Wesley Harding

Still no new cat photos due to stolen camera, but here's a few videos of recent interest (if you're seeing this on Facebook, you'll have to go back to the original post to see them.

Here, old friend Art Wallace premieres his new online reality show, Spirit Seekers:

Some clips of Cleveland horror host Ghoulardi:

Woolworth record commercials from 1971 and 1980:

And finally, a little inexplicable adaptation of Star Trek: The Next Generation:

Ah, after rehearsing all morning, the kids are now doing their scenes for their teachers, other classes and parents/guests. They're doing their best -- many of them are shy and reading quietly from scripts, hating being on stage completely, but a few are more natural performers, and watching them get into it when they get audience reaction for the first time, and what it does for them, is very heartening. Maybe one or two of them will want to keep with it, at least part time. I hope so.

Petey Plymouth, the Funambulator, my beloved old big blue minivan, stolen three weeks ago, IS BACK.

And no thanks to the police of the 9th Precinct, who wouldn't let me file a police report these three weeks, as I didn't have proper documentation (by their standards) for the car (which is actually my mother's, and in her name, in another state, which I can see causing problems, but not to this extent). I was treated myself like I was trying to put something over on them, like I was a suspect myself, every time I went in to them. Well, fuck 'em.

It was actually fairly simple, finding Petey. I had been checking online every day to see if the car had been ticketed, figuring that if it wasn't stripped, chopped, or in another state, it would be ditched somewhere, and would wind up being towed or ticketed (as there had been a slow leak in the left rear tire, I figured this was an even more likely possibility). Well yup, that happened, and the ticket showed up on the online system yesterday. The ticket said that, at the time it was given (the very day AFTER it was stolen), it was in Bed-Stuy, near the corner of Ralph and Jefferson Avenues. So, I decided to go out and see if it was still there.

It was. With a flat tire, yes. I had hoped to just jump in and drive it away (flat and all), but as I walked by it, I tried to open the door with the remote control, and it didn't work, meaning the battery was dead or gone. So I turned around and walked to the 81st Precinct, a few blocks away.

The desk man there was much nicer, and listened to the whole story patiently. He said that as I'd never actually filed a report, either I could go to the 9th again and tell them what was up, or, since the car wasn't actually "stolen" as far as the police were concerned, just call AAA and have them tow it where I wanted. He suggested the latter as easier all around, and I agreed, called AAA, and set it up.

Now he also made it clear (and it pretty well was already) that this was NOT an especially safe corner for a big, dorky, 41-year-old whiteboy to be hanging around, an I shouldn't go back to my car until the truck was there. So I waited for the call that it was nearby, and returned. "Nearby," however, turned out to be a very relative concept, as I wound up waiting about 15 minutes for the truck. During that exact time, the sun set, and what had seemed merely slightly foolhardy now seemed downright idiotic. I had passed a gentleman involved in some kind of dispute with someone else regarding a transaction of money and marijuana (in rather more colloquial terms, of course). He wound up focusing on me from across the street, and stated that I should come join him, as I needed to talk to him. I cheerfully replied that I had to stay where I was, and didn't see the need in joining him to talk behind the large 30-yard garbage bin where he indicated. This was repeated for a while, until he gave up and simply glared at me, as the truck showed up.

To make a long story short (too late), Petey went on the flatbed, flatbed went to my usual garage, where, despite being closed, a mechanic I knew, Karl, was working. He brought the car in, we looked to see what was wrong (flat tire, side door forced open, battery damaged beyond repair), and he told me he'd give me a call when it was ready.

And just three hours ago, I got the call from the garage that all was good, and I could come and get the car.

Now, here's the STUPID thing. The way it was PROBABLY stolen -- I'm not sure -- is that I PROBABLY left a spare key, that I had forgotten even existed, in either the glovebox or under the passenger seat. Oh, duh. So they probably just broke in to steal stuff, found the key, and decided it would be easier to loot in another neighborhood. I don't remember for sure if I had another key, but I kinda think I did, and there's no indication that they did anything to drive it away other than turn a key.

(So if you might be doing the same thing, think about it, check, and get that key out of your car if you left one there)

Fortunately, there was nothing in the car to lead them back to it, and there's a Club on it now. I did indeed lose my suit, my camera, and Berit's jigsaw, but everything else was there, so I'm feeling fairly lucky at this point.

In any case, it was a REAL pleasure to dive Petey to The Brick again today. As if celebrating, the iPod (which I put on my driving "Big Blue Plymouth" playlist) came up with a GREAT 9 songs to enjoy while back on the road with my vehicle -- yes, I chose the first, but the rest came up nicely randomly:

1. "Roadrunner (Thrice)" -- Jonathan Richman & The Modern Lovers -- 7" single b-side
2. "Strange" -- R.E.M. -- Document
3. "Southern Girls" -- Cheap Trick -- In Color
4. "Jukebox (Don't Put Another Dime) -- The Flirts -- New Wave Hits of the 80s Volume 11
5. "MacLeans Toothpaste promo" -- Peter & Gordon -- Psychedelic Promos and Radio Spots volume 3
6. "Daydream Believer" -- Lord Sitar -- Ultra-Lounge: On the Rocks
7. "Mystery Roach" -- Frank Zappa & The Mothers -- 200 Motels
8. "Making Plans for Nigel" -- XTC -- Drums and Wires
9. "The Prisoner" -- The Clash -- Super Black Market Clash

I am also amused now that, due to some weird cock-up that's occurred recently in the iPod, I'm now getting completely wrong album cover illustrations to accompany some of these tunes, so that when I see Cheap Trick's "Southern Girls" listed, for example, it's next to the not-exactly-right cover for Nino Rota's soundtrack to Zeffarelli's Romeo and Juliet, and next to the XTC track is the cover to The Carl Stalling Project. When this started happening, I was annoyed, but now I'm enjoying the incongruities that occur.

Ah well, back to work at The Brick . . . today and tonight, I'm lighting Craven Monkey. Much work to do . . .

Still not feeling so good today, and I have tons of errands to get to, so I'll make it quick.

The Fight Fest at The Brick has opened, and we're off to a mostly good start thus far. Excellent, speedy preview cabaret on Tuesday night that seemed to get everyone up and ready for the Fest, and a terrific first performance of The Buccaneer last night -- the show is funny as hell.

The Ninja Cherry Orchard, which I'm lighting (and running board on), was also supposed to open last night, but has been delayed as it's a huge damned show that hasn't had the chance to work things enough that need to be worked, so it's opening a week late. We ran it (mostly) last night and got some good things accomplished (and I was able to refine my lights a bit more here and there and get to know the show better, which was a good thing), and we'll do the same thing tonight. I guess they'll work it a bit more in other spaces in the next week, but I won't be needed, or available, for that as I'll be off on other things, including lighting another Fest show, Piper McKenzie's Craven Monkey and the Mountain of Fury, my duties for which include being at The Brick tomorrow morning at 9.00 am, after being there late on Ninja Cherry Orchard. Argh.

Still, despite the hours I'm currently keeping on the Fest (which will ease up shortly), I'm pretty damned happy with it -- everything I've seen from all the shows as yet looks entertaining and exciting, at the very least. Hope to see some of you around The Brick this month (of course, as most of the friends who read this are probably IN Ninja Cherry Orchard or Craven Monkey or Deck the Hallmans, if not more than one of them, that's a pretty good bet).

And here's a Random Ten from the 25,239 tracks in the iPod (with links to the songs or something close):

1. "The Woo Woo Train" - The Valentines - The Doo Wop Box II vol 2: 1955-1957
2. "Weak Become Heroes" - The Streets - Original Pirate Material
3. "Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby (Standing In The Shadow)" - Lord Sitar - Mindexpanders 1 - In Search Of The Orgastic Flashtastic Psychspastic Groove
4. "One More Time" - Billy Stewart - One More Time
5. "Rooster Blues" - Lightnin' Slim - Excello Story, Volume 3: 1957 - 1961
6. "Fountains" - The Nils - Sell Out Young EP
7. "Rockin' Lafayette" - Dave Alvin Featuring Red Devils - L. A. Rockabilly
8. "Go On, It's OK" - Lonnie Barron - Boppin' Hillbilly 19
9. "Madrigal" - Paul & Barry Ryan - Fading Yellow volume 1
10. "No Easy Way Down" - Dusty Springfield - Dusty In Memphis

Oh, and I'm also appearing on stage tonight, in a way -- on video in Tom X. Chao's Callous Cad which is opening at Dixon Place.

Once again, as I have been before . . .

I am a giant, imposing video face out to torment someone on the stage below . . .

Okay, enough procrastinating . . . off now to deal with unpleasant and vaguely threatening authority figures . . .

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 great big lousy awful jus'-plain-shitty news of the week has been that Petey Plymouth (aka "The Funambulator"), that beaten-up ol' 1994 Plymouth Grand Voyager minivan with the flaking-off paint and the constant breaking-down over one thing or another, was actually STOLEN (!!!) from 2nd Street between 1st Avenue and Avenue A in Manhattan this past Sunday.

Berit and I are annoyed (that our ride is gone), pissed (that we had a few things in there we miss - nothing irreplaceable in the long run, but including several gifts to us that we valued -- a jigsaw, a digital camera, a nice new 3-piece suit -- not things we can just get again easily), and stunned (that of ALL the cars on that block to steal, they chose a beaten-up 1994 minivan -- WHY?!).

Here's the lost boy in happier times -- as usual, in front of The Brick, as once seen on Google Maps (they've changed the street view of Metropolitan Avenue since then), during one of the Clown Festivals:

And unfortunately, as the car was actually my mother's, registered to her in Maine, the police aren't being too helpful in allowing me to even REPORT the theft as (understandably, yes) I have to PROVE that I have some connection to the car. Mom faxed me a whole bunch of documentation, but it wasn't good enough for them (faxes, that is), so I'm waiting for a package of original documents to arrive. As of now, even if it turned up somewhere, the police wouldn't know that it was stolen, or who to contact, as they wouldn't take the report. Great. All I can do (until I can actually make the report) is check online to see if the car's been towed or ticketed for being left in some other location, and be ready to grab it if it is.

The theft was a crappy end to an otherwise wonderful Sunday past, as we had a magnificent matinee of Kitsch at Theater for the New City (followed by a great Indian dinner on 6th Street for Berit and I). There were only 8 people in the audience, and I told the cast to just blow it out and have fun with it, and they did and gave the best performance of the run thus far. Until last night.

We only had 6 people in the house (which seats 85, so BOY does it look bare with less than two handfuls out there) last night -- there WERE 8 for a while, but right as we were about to begin a couple realized they were in the wrong theatre and left to go to the "correct" one next door. Damn. We also had a strangely vocal (with each other) young couple, one of whom left for the bathroom for a while during Part One, and then suddenly decided to leave altogether right as the lights came up on Part Two (after sitting there through most of Intermission). And did so with audible goodbyes and many kisses to the woman he left sitting there. Then, for whatever reason, having left, he came BACK IN midway through the scene, as the actors were, you know, working, and said goodbye and kissed his date AGAIN. Very distracting.

That said, the cast topped Sunday's performance with last night's -- which was fast, funny, confident, and energetic. I hope these qualities don't decrease as we get more audience back in (I know some of the speed will as we have to hold more for laughs again, rather than running on over the handful of chuckles we were getting last night). And I hope we GET more audience back this week . . . it seems like EVERYONE I know is coming to next Friday's performance. Everyone waits for closing week anyway, and now since we're doing a post-Thanksgiving ticket discount, people are waiting to take advantage of that, I think. The show's last two performances have been killer, I'd now like some others to enjoy this, too.

There's now a set of photos from the show, for those who are interested, HERE.

And here's this week's Random Ten from the iPod (with associated links) out of the 25,179 tracks in there right now . . .

1. "In the Mood" - Walter Horton - Sun Records: The Blues Years 1950-1958 vol. 3
2. "Forty Four" - Geoff Muldaur - Mix Disk from my Dad
3. "Heartbreak Hotel" - John Cale - Seducing Down The Door: A Collection 1970-1990
4. "Lookin' for a Place to Park" - Slim Gaillard - Laughing In Rhythm, #2 - Groove Juice Special
5. "Up & Down" - Mom's Boys - Pebbles Volume 9 - Southern California
6. "Ride Your Mule Part 1" - Marvin Holmes & the Uptights - The Git Down!
7. "Theme From 'The Traitors'" - The Packabeats - Highly Strung Vol.1
8. "Night Comes On" - Leonard Cohen - Various Positions
9. "Song to Woody" - Bob Dylan - Bob Dylan
10. "Leiyla" - The West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band - The West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band Part One

And from the now-gone digital camera, a few last shots . . . first a Friday Cat Blogging shot, with Hooker and Moni doing their occasional yin/yang act on the chair at the computer . . .

And here's a shot from backstage at Theater for the New City a couple of days before we opened, as Berit paints "Vogelbaum's" painting from the show during one of our late nights of working . . .

Now, off to napland before the long subway {sigh} ride into the city for the show . . .

We opened Kitsch on Thursday, and, amazingly, all is going pretty well for such a complex show that was rehearsed in so many pieces, and never got a run-through with the full cast until opening night.

I'd write more about it now, but I'm rushed as I've agreed to be an IT Awards judge for a show I'm seeing at a matinee in Queens this afternoon, and still have to type up and email my note son last night to the cast. So I'm attending two 2.5 hour shows today -- one as judge, one as director/tech operator. Long day. At least after tomorrow's matinee I'll have a few days off.

I'll try to write more then.

Here's a nice Random Ten for the day (with links so you can hear most of them yourself) from among the 25,159 tracks on the iPod . . .

1. "Eighties Fan" - Camera Obscura - Rough Trade Shops: Indiepop 1
2. "Messin' Around" - Little Killers - The Little Killers
3. "Love Me Like A Reptile" - Motorhead - Ace Of Spades
4. "Guess Things Happen That Way" - Johnny Cash - The Complete Sun Singles: Volume 3
5. "Example #22 (live)" - Laurie Anderson - United States Live Part 3
6. "Pidgin English" - Elvis Costello & The Attractions - Imperial Bedroom
7. "The Laughing Man" - John Carter & Russ Alquist - Tektites - Vol II
8. "My Real Gone Rocket" - Jackie Brenston - Sun Records: The Blues Years 1950-1958 vol. 1
9. "Mozambique" - Bob Dylan - Desire
10. "Love's Gone Bad" - Chris Clark - One Kiss Can Lead to Another: Girl Group Sounds Lost and Found

And a shot from just a few minutes ago, as Hooker once again paws my shoulder as I try to do my online work . . .

"Why those kittehs no get cheezburgers? Give them the cheezburgers if they wants dem! Now cn we looks at 'Fuck You Penguin'?"

Off to the first of today's two shows . . .

In the past year or so (maybe back to the August, 2008 season), I've begun having a kind of recurring dream as I get to the "stress point" in the production of a show I'm directing/designing -- it's never the same, but it's the same kind of dream:

I'm driving my car, and someone else on the road is making a horrible mistake that will result in them hitting me if I don't suddenly do something defensive and correct -- they may have made a wrong-way turn onto the one-way street I'm driving down, and I'm suddenly heading into their headlights, or they're trying to merge into the lane right where I am, or whatever, but always I have a car coming at me and I have to dodge with care and precision. These aren't exactly nightmares, as I always do avoid the other car, and I'm never woken up by some horrible dream-crash, but whenever I eventually wake up, I don't feel so terribly rested. Quite the opposite, I feel quite tense and fearful. It takes a good rehearsal to pull me out of the feeling of dread that hangs over me after one of these.

As Trav S.D. said when I mentioned this to him after Kitsch rehearsal last night, these dreams don't exactly need much in the way of interpretation here, it's all pretty much on the surface (and I should mention that these dream near-misses ALWAYS occur on roads I know well and have to drive to and from rehearsal of whatever play I'm working on -- yesterday's nap-dream-accident occurred on Houston Street just West of the FDR Drive).

That said, Kitsch, which opens in less than a week, is coming together okay. We'll be fine -- I will have some serious stress in the next few days in getting the lights, sound cues and projections together, but I'll get it done (not as fast as I'd like, but in time to run them enough before opening). I'll be seeing David Brune, the set designer, and Karen Flood, the costume designer, at the space today as we all go through the stock at TNC to find what we can pull and use for our show and I learn a bit more about the lighting setup and what I have available to me that way.

Tonight we'll run the thing from top to bottom again, as we did on Wednesday. Monday we ran Part II twice, and Tuesday we did Part I twice (with some skips in each case for actors who weren't there). On those days, the two individual parts looked in good shape, but when we put them together on Wednesday, it didn't quite sing as much, but I think it was just an off-day, and people are still struggling with the lines at times, which doesn't help. Last night, I worked the staging of 7 of the song sequences with the singers of those songs (there are 9 songs in the show), and focused them and made them clear, so we're all happy with those now. Trav also cut several of the longer songs down, which was needed -- the songs were great on their own as songs, but as pieces of a larger piece of theatre (pieces which I had asked for, as Trav had cut them from the play for a bit, but I thought they would really add to the whole work overall), a couple of them stayed with us a beat or two too long.

In any case, I'm now suddenly rushed to get myself together to run errands and get to the theatre (and hoping that the earlier Yankees parade hasn't screwed up traffic TOO much in getting to TNC), so I'd better finish this up as fast as I can . . .

Here's this week's Random Ten from the 25,101 tracks in the iPod, with associated YouTube links so you can hear the song there, or something else by that artist (there are some quite good video links in here this week, I should mention, and songs that, if you don't know them, are worth getting to know):

1. "The World Spins" - Julee Cruise - Floating Into The Night
2. "Dick Tracy" - The Chants - Get Back Up Again 3
3. "Matzoh Balls" - Slim Gaillard - Laughing In Rhythm, #1 - Flat Foot Floogie
4. "Midnight Showers of Rain" - Willie Nix - Sun Records: The Blues Years 1950-1958 vol. 3
5. "You Let A Love Burn Out" - We Five - You Were On My Mind & Make Someone Happy
6. "Strange Weather" - Marianne Faithfull - Strange Weather
7. "Nenen Corta Essa" - Erasmo Carlos - Rato's Nostalgia Collection 1
8. "You're My Best Friend" - Queen - A Night At The Opera
9. "Don't Hurt My Little Sister" - Shonen Knife - The Birds & The B-Sides
10. "The Director Never Yelled 'Cut'" - Sparks - Exotic Creatures Of The Deep

And as for weekly cat-blogging, here's a recent picture of Hooker "helping me" at the computer, while I'm trying to get work done:

I'm looking forward to a brief, slightly "relaxed" day tomorrow, where I'll be working a little more with one or two singers in Kitsch on the last two songs, and then doing the improv theatre performance (and screening) with David Finkelstein that I hope some friends will show up at (check the link for details, folks).

Then, back to Kitsch full-time on Sunday . . .

And now, back to work . . . I'm going to put on some Mike Nesmith now to work to . . . excellent "chill-out" music . . .

Because of people's Halloween plans, as well as the annual crazy huge Halloween event at Theater for the New City, we've wound up with a few unexpected days off from working on Kitsch (while Trav has been working his songs with the singers). Berit is using the time to try and adjust her sleep schedule to something reasonable by the time we're back in rehearsal on Sunday (and at the same time avoiding the scary theatre and movies I plan on seeing, which are not to her taste anymore), and I'm going off and seeing other peoples' shows that I was expecting to have to miss.

Last night, it was Up for Anything by Marc Spitz at The Kraine, which was about as funny as expected -- I was in a reading of it earlier this year that was quite hysterical. It wasn't quite as funny at the start as it was at the reading -- certain pace things that work perfectly when a play is read don't work as well when it's on its feet, and the first section of the play seemed a little rushed and a bit TOO frenetic, but as it settled down a bit it all evened out.

And favorite Gemini CollisionWorks actors Alyssa Simon and Ivanna Cullinan were in there (along with Yuri Skujins, an old acquaintance I haven't seen in many MANY years) doing great work, so I was VERY glad I got the chance to see it, which I didn't expect. Wound up sitting with and talking with Tom Murrin of PAPER Magazine, a GCW supporter from way back, and we were good audience members to have laughing in the front row, I'm told. The show plays through tomorrow, if you're able and inclined to see it.

Tonight, I'm off to The Brick for the annual Blood Brothers show from Nosedive Productions -- I lit last year's and had a good time on that (and on their Infectious Opportunity, which I also lit). I'm not sure I'm in the mood for gore tonight, but I'm gonna get it, I'm sure.

The beloved CollisionWorks iPod is . . . acting up. It's going on three years old, and I've read in many places that three years is about what you should expect from an iPod, so our heavily-used baby may be on its way out. Last night, for the first time, it began repeatedly freezing or shutting down for no apparent reason. At the same time, I had just cleaned out a little space to put some tracks on there, and wound up then stuffing it to less than a MB of its life, so it may have been a space issue. I did a big cleaning today, giving it 2.5 gigs of safe space (a gig of which I then filled, of course).

So, from the something like 24,996 tracks on the damned thing now, here's a Random Ten for today, with associated links:

1. "Two Daughters And A Beautiful Wife" - Drive-By Truckers - Brighter Than Creation's Dark
2. "Caryn Shaffer" - Wesley Willis - Greatest Hits Volume 2
3. "Mama, Mama -Talk To Your Daughter" - Magic Sam - West Side Soul
4. "The Dreams Of Children" - The Jam - Direction, Reaction, Creation
5. "The "In" Crowd" - The First Gear - Jimmy's Back Pages...The Early Years
6. "Push Button Love" - Internationals - Lost Deep Soul Treasures 5
7. "Here Today, Gone Tomorrow" - The Ramones - Rocket To Russia
8. "Do I Do I Do I" - Richard Berry - Baby, Please Come Home
9. "Bonus Pay" - Pat Hare - Sun Records: The Blues Years 1950-1958 vol. 8
10. "Eighties" - Killing Joke - Night Time

Tomorrow, Halloween, I'll be spending some of the day in rehearsal for the improv performance I'm doing with David Finkelstein a week after - as you can read about HERE.

After that, it's off to Millennium for Sinister Six Must Be Destroyed . . . but I haven't the time to write any more now . . .

So, since I have to run to get to the show, here's a quick grab of a recent shot of Berit and the two kitties, who have been quite annoying sweet recently (as I've been writing this Hooker has been casing me and leaping up on me quite a few times, despite the fact that there is no lap to jump into, and if I don't catch him, he'll just fall to the floor, which has been what's happening):

We've been continuing to rehearse Kitsch every night, though we've wound up with some unexpected nights off as we've lost the people or space we'd need to rehearse. Frankly, this one is tiring enough to put together that the nights off (and we get one tomorrow, hooray) are probably more productive for me in giving me some rest and time to consider the work.

Still, we're actually a little bit ahead of where I thought we'd be at this point, mainly because the actors are picking things up fairly quickly, though I'm going to have to constantly be vigilant about everyone's timing in this precise farce (a pain, when it appears at this point that we will NEVER have the full cast of 19 together at any one time until the ONE night before the show opens . . . {sigh}).

Up until recently, we've mostly been rehearsing in the chilly basement of Theater for the New City, amongst old props, costumes, and set pieces. Here's Josh Mertz and Avery Pearson as Violet Vogelbaum and Heinz Bruderlieben, having a lover's spat in the Klub Katzenratzen:

And here's Roger Nasser, Esther Silberstein, Josh, and Avery from the other side, as another spat between Violet and Heinz is watched by Klaus Hanswurst, busboy, and Schwamm, the Klub Katzenratzen singer:

This past week, and hopefully for most of our remaining rehearsals, we've moved upstairs to the actual space the show will be in, the vast (for me) Johnson Theater. Here's Berit (can you spot her? she's actually standing in the same "place" of the set as Esther in the picture above) in the midst of our rehearsal set . . .

That's a lot of space to fill, but it's looking good thus far. Sounding okay, too -- I was worried about echo making the lines muddy, but it's not too bad, and once the back curtain is pulled and our set is in there (and, hopefully, an audience) the reverb should be decreased to a perfectly fine level.

Tonight, Sunday, and Tuesday we're supposed to be in this space, and I've called as much of the full cast as I can for those days (which means 10-14 people, depending on the day) so we can put the pieces of the show together -- but there's always the chance at TNC that we show up and need to be moved to a smaller space (one night, as I noted, we wound up in a hallway), so I'm keeping my fingers crossed that we get to keep working in the Johnson, as it makes the show a lot clearer.

So . . . we're okay on this, but not so much that I can relax.

Meanwhile, back in the iPod, here's today's Random Ten (with assorted links) from the 25,580 tracks in there . . .

1. "Hope" - Kristin Hersh - Strange Angels
2. "The Director Never Yelled 'Cut'" - Sparks - Exotic Creatures Of The Deep
3. "Speak To Me" - PP Arnold - The First Cut
4. "That Is Rock & Roll" - The Coasters - Fifty Coastin' Classics
5. "Peekaboo! (muzak version)" - Devo - E-Z Listening Disc
6. "Sinners" - The Cramps - Flamejob
7. "Anybody Seen My Baby?" - The Rolling Stones - Bridges To Babylon
8. "Devil In Disguise" - Elvis Presley - Beat of the Pops 02
9. "If I Didn't Love You" - Squeeze - Singles 45's And Under
10. "You Should Know" - The Sevens - The Sevens

And yes, some recent pictures of the kitties . . . Berit having some cuddle time with a sleepy boy . . .

And Berit tried to get some late night reading in, but has some friends that won't quite let her . . .

Okay, and now I have to get myself ready for our first "full cast" (11 out of 19) stumblethru tonight -- still figuring out where everyone goes much of the time . . .

Phew. Rehearsals every single day for Kitsch. Getting tired, but there's work to be done.

And today, a day late (as yesterday was taken up with reorganizing last night's rehearsal due to cast member illness), I finally get to the Random Ten (out of 25,580) from the iPod, with links to associated YouTube videos where available . . .

1. "Skin Deep" - Stranglers - Aural Sculpture
2. "Valerie" - Amy Winehouse with Mark Ronson - Mix Disk - Dad
3. "Rubberleg Twist" - The Isley Brothers - Twist And Shout
4. "Percy's On The Run" - High Broom - Psychedelic Archaeology Volume 8
5. "I'm On a Boat" - The Lonely Island (feat. T-Pain) - Incredibad
6. "Little Bianca" - The Bitter Poet & The Sound of Angst - Rocket Red Fingernails
7. "Funny Anymore" - The Heartbeats - East of Croydon
8. "Super Good (Parts 1 & 2)" - Vicki Anderson (as Myra Barnes) - James Brown's Funky People (Part 2)
9. "You Better Get a Better" - The Beatstalkers - Decca Originals: The Freakbeat Scene (1964-1968)
10. "Cruisers Creek" - The Fall - 458489 A Sides

Work proceeds on the production of Kitsch: Or, Two for the Price of One, which opens in . . . whoa . . . just under four weeks. Yeesh.

More info on the show HERE

Rehearsals have been a lot of fun for this show. I'm getting to pull out anything and everything I've ever learned from movie comedies of the 30s and 40s (and a few things from Warner Bros. cartoons as well). Double and triple-takes, slow burns, slapstick, comic sound effects . . . they're all showing up.

Theater for the New City has been a somewhat enjoyable place to work. I like the space itself, and the feeling of community you get there, which has been welcoming to me in faster order than I figured it would. Of course, with the easygoing atmosphere, you also get the kind of laissez-faire attitude that results in showing up last night to find the rehearsal room double-booked, so that we wound up rehearsing in a hallway. We still wound up doing perfectly good work that I was pleased with, but as the hallway was next to the bathrooms, we had to take an extended break from work and discuss blocking for another scene when a show upstairs broke for intermission and our working space became a corridor again. The work was still excellent.

Still, I am enjoying the feeling of "going to work" in a theatre that I'm not on staff at for a change, as well as visiting an old neighborhood of mine every day. I used to live around the corner from TNC on 10th Street, and I've been revisiting some of the restaurants I used to go to regularly for take-out while there (the food at Paquitos, where David Mcintyre and I got burritos every night while we were writing Even the Jungle, tastes exactly the same 18 years later). A lot more Indian and Ruben's Empenadas in the diet than usual. The area's a lot more gentrified, of course, but not as much as I had figured, actually.

So we're pretty good on this show, but I'm still a hair concerned about having all the design elements and music set in time without last minute craziness. I'll catch up on that on Monday (which is now a "day off" from rehearsal, but not from the show).

And as for today's cat blogging, here's a shot from last week of how I prefer Hooker to join me when I'm on the computer and trying to work or just enjoy myself -- this way I can pay attention to both the computer and the cat . . .

And, from this morning, here's how he likes to get attention from me while I'm on the computer, where he makes it clear that he is more important than whatever I'm trying to do online . . .

Time to begin psyching myself up for tonight's rehearsal . . .

We're two rehearsals into Kitsch now, and it's been a good start. We've staged about 26-27 pages of script (out of 101 total) and the tone is becoming apparent. There were concerns about a few things, and whether they'd work or not -- will it work for this farce, which takes place in Berlin in 1989 after the Wall comes down, for some of the characters to have "stage-German" accents and for others not to? Yes, it will -- that are being answered as we try things.

There are still tonal things that need to be modified and worked out -- how far exactly to go with those accents; how far to go with the "swishiness" or not of the gay characters (in this farce, it seems right to go to almost Mel Brooksian levels, especially to contrast one gay twin from his straight brother, but there IS an offensiveness line that can be easily crossed); there's a lot of Brechtiness in the script, but how much Weimar/Brecht/Weill do we bring in vs. how much actual 1989? -- but we're only two rehearsals in with 24 to go, so we have some time to work things out (not too much, though).

Simple scenes thus far, for the most part. I was a hair stymied by the brief exposition transition from the prologue to the first scene of the play proper last night, when an idea came up that I hadn't considered before that looked to change my whole view of staging the section -- I had a visual gag planned for the scene, but a bit of prop handling I hadn't fully worked out led to the creation of a different gag, which was a less "sure" gag than the first one (that is, it could REALLY work or REALLY fail as a piece of humor, and the first one was a fairly definite laugh, or at least chuckle). So I had to decide between a gag that would work that I had planned, or one that could either work better or fail miserably, but which would also solve a problem of getting some props offstage (a major pain). An offhanded suggestion - more a joke about it - from Josh Mertz led to a solution that combined both gags into a better one, albeit one that's still unsure of a laugh (and brings up the question, when you throw a baby offstage, is it funnier if it's just tossed, or if you hear the sound of the baby going "Waaaaaaa!" as it arcs away?).

Monday will be a sudden jump in difficulty staging-wise, though, as I'll have almost the entire cast there for the climactic scene of the farce in which everything comes together. This involves 16 to 18 actors (not sure yet) with a whole lot of extremely specific blocking which must look chaotic, including the use of four "fake shemps" disguised as half of the four sets of twins the play centers on (it's basically The Comedy of Errors with two extra sets of twins, broken up in infancy and sent to either side of the Berlin Wall, all finally meeting up and causing confusion on the night it comes down - a nice classic farce, with a pedigree that goes back over 2000 years).

In any case, it's underway and won't be stopping now.

Back on the iPod, here's today's Random Ten (and associated YouTube links) out of 25,552 tracks:

1. "Dilated Eyes" - The Gregorians - You Deceived Me: USA Garage Greats 1965-1967
2. "Joey's On The Streets Again" - The Boomtown Rats - The Best Of The Boomtown Rats: The Millennium Collection
3. "King of Comedy" - R.E.M. - Monster
4. "Last Dance" - The Mekons - Fear and Whiskey
5. "The Picnic" - Johnny Mandel - The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With The Sea soundtrack
6. "Love Me" - Koko Taylor - What It Takes: The Chess Years
7. "30 Seconds Over Tokyo (live 1993)" - Pere Ubu - The Late Show
8. "CBS Marijuana Special" - Radio Promo - Rock'n'Roll - The Untold Story Vol. 6: The Jivin' Novelty Party Record

TV ANNOUNCER: "See a CBS Special on marijuana, 'Get the Habit' -- stay tuned to this channel!"
9. "Rots-O-Ruck" - Richard Marino - Ultra-Lounge 18: Bottoms Up
10. "I Shall Not Be Moved" - Johnny Cash - Unearthed

And a couple of new kitty photos from the last couple of days . . . Hooker, who has become a NEEDY attention hound of a cat since our last time away, here with Berit on the couch . . .

And, just a few minutes ago as I write this, nudging me in the face and pawing at me for attention, jealous of the computer . . .

Maybe I'll get some new photos of Moni for next week; she never seems to stand still long enough for a good photo, though.

Tomorrow we have a day off of rehearsal for Kitsch (one of only two we have between now and opening weekend, the other being Halloween), which B & I will spend going up to Darien, CT - just a bit north of my ol' hometown - where my dad, Nils Hill, is in a group show with some pretty good company, to say the least (he's a painter, in case you didn't know, as is my stepmother, Ivy Dachman). I'm looking forward to the small day trip up into the home state.

Also, in other events, there are 2 shows opening this weekend from friendly creators and spaces you might check out:

1. Titus Andronicus from Danse Macabre Theatrics at my homebase The Brick (looks to be Frank Cwiklik's usual intoxicating and overwhelming blend of staging and media); and,

2. Marc Spitz's new comedy Up for Anything at The Kraine, which I was in a reading of not long ago -- it's hysterically funny, like most of Marc's work (I've directed/acted in two of his plays, The Hobo Got Too High and Marshmallow World, and loved it), and has a really terrific cast (including CollisionWorks favorite Alyssa Simon).

And a first notice: Some of you may have seen my show Sacrificial Offerings this August, the text of which came from improvisational work by myself and David Finkelstein, who has been doing this kind of work for years as Lake Ivan Performance Group.

The play also contained a video by David called Marvelous Discourse, which was based on the videotape of the same improvisation that created the text of the play (David's notes on the video are HERE).

Well, there will be a screening of that video, along with another video of David's, Terrifying Blankness, created with a different improv partner, at CRS on Saturday, November 7 at 8.00 pm.

And most excitingly for me, David and I will also be performing a live 15-minute long improvisation that evening. I have been refreshed and rejuvenated in many ways by the work I've been doing with David this year, and the idea of doing some of this improvisatory theatre work live (the first time, for me) is something I very much look forward to. Details are at the links above; more info as the date gets closer.

Okay, time to leave the computer and prepare for tonight -- just found out I'm short an actor I expected, so revisions to the schedule must be made . . .