CollisionWorks

Isaac Butler has already noted his own case of Charles Isherwood fatigue as a reason for not dealing with the latest wince and eye-roll-inducing take on NYC Theatre from our boy What-The Fuck-Chuck of the NY Times, and I was pretty much in the same boat. I felt that I had dealt with my feelings on WTFC on enough occasions HERE and HERE and especially in the video/performance piece Berit and I created for The Brick's quinquennial party - a post describing it is HERE, and I might as well take the opportunity to embed the video portion here one more time:

( WHAT ARE YOU LOOKING AT? )

The new piece didn't bug me so much at first, once I got past the vomitous opening paragraphs - in the end, I just kinda felt, "Well . . . he's trying . . ." about this piece on the move to Off-Broadway of several OOB works. I had a discussion with some other Brick staff about it, and we somewhat came to that conclusion as well. He's trying, at least, even if OOB appears to be a wild, woolly, and lawless wild west zone to WTFC. There's some interesting info on ERS and Jenny Schwartz in there, and hey, I thought, if WTFC brings some audience to those shows, fine, I'll take the insults.

Maybe it's being an OOB artist who is used to having my level of theatre slapped around by the press that created that shrug and lethargic response to this piece. Garrett Eisler at The Playgoer, a critic who knows and respects his Indie Theatre, is not so sanguine about it, and got my blood properly boiling again with his take on the piece, "Ish Sets OOB Back 30 Years."

As Isaac did, I recommend Garrett's piece for a good explanation of why we should be so damned angry with WTFC for this piece. He's right.

So, as long as I'm posting video (as always now, behind cuts, for those with the browsers that crash), here's some others I ran into today and wanted to share . . .

flyswatter posted this Rudy Ray Moore trailer for a favorite BadFilm of mine (my friend Jim Baker introduced me to it, calling it "Plan 10 From Inner City"). Can you motherfuckers take the power of DOLEMITE?

( Goddamn, Mama, This Sure Is a Spooky Joint . . . )

(my favorite RRM film is still Petey Wheatstraw, The Devil's Son-In-Law, though)

And finally, courtesy Tom Tomorrow at This Modern World, a civics lesson as Penguin and The Batman discuss the American electorate:

( Remember, NO POLITICS )

Enjoy.

Just finished about six solid hours of writing/editing/conceiving work on Spell, with another hour or two spread out earlier in the day. Feels good.

Sent off the 22 pages of material I now have to the cast, to give them something to look at and think about at this point.

Here's the first page of what I sent:

SPELL
Moira Stone - ANN
Fred Backus - Doctor General Jane (aka 2 JANE)
Alyssa Simon - General Doctor Jane (aka 1 JANE)
Jorge Cordova - ANDY
Iracel Rivero - WITCH 1 (Cuba)
Rasha Zamamiri - WITCH 2 (Palestine)
Jeanie Tse - WITCH 3 (China)
Gavin Starr Kendall – The MAN
Olivia Baseman - Fragment 1 (girlfriend aka FRAG 1)
Sammy Tunis - Fragment 2 (woman of business aka FRAG 2)
Liz Toft - Fragment 3 (worker aka FRAG 3)

SEGMENTS currently conceived (not really in any order yet):

I. Opening – swinging lamp over ANN as she sings “Couldn’t Hear Nobody Pray,” stopped by 2 JANE, then buzzer, siren, explosion and screams.

II. First Interview – same dialogue done four times between ANN and 1 JANE/2 JANE from different perspectives.

III. Light Bulb Discussion

IV. The Bedtime Ritual (with diagnosis speech from 2 JANE) – midshow relaxation/expansion

V. The Firing Squad Dream Sequence (relates to following sequence listed – “Piggies”)

VI. The Witches or Fragments Become Manson Girls

VII. ANN as Patty Hearst as “Tania” (connect to Che Guevara’s “Tania”?)

VIII. ANDY’s revolutionary speech (with James Brown cape routine)

IX. The introduction of the FRAGMENTS and their positions

X. The MAN and FRAG 1

XI. The MAN and FRAG 2

XII. The MAN and FRAG 3 (includes stereotyped “chasing the secretary round the desk” sequence, set to “Yakety Sax” – 1 JANE makes ANN back up and tell the story “right”)

XIII. The Male Gaze lecture – ANN lines up the women downstage – the men gather upstage to be manly and laugh together

XIV. WITCH 1 spell sequence

XV. WITCH 2 spell sequence

XVI. WITCH 3 spell sequence

XVII. ANN and 1 JANE/2 JANE discussion – Cuba

XVIII. ANN and 1 JANE/2 JANE discussion – Palestine

XIX. ANN and 1 JANE/2 JANE discussion – China

XX. ANN and ANDY on trains, travel, and getting to know the country

XXI. Finale – ANN accepts her actions – exit – “Just Another Day”

When I have some that excerpts well, I'll put it up.

So, a couple of good ass-kicking images that brightened my day . . . first, from LP Cover Lover, a man who kicks arse for the LORD!

And from Photo Basement, Batman kicks ass because he's full of PAIN!

And in video land, this young man's "Pyro System" could kick someone's ass, maybe his own . . .

( Darwin Award waiting to happen . . . )

Gary Cooper kicks cyborg ass!

( High Tech Noon )

And the Mean Kitty is just ass-kicking mean . . .

( Hey, Little Sparta )

Enjoy.

Back from Maine, back in rehearsal.

On the way up there, I was on a tight schedule to make the first of two appointments I had to have to get my wisdom teeth out, and just 20 miles short of my destination, Petey throws a tire tread.

Nice.

At least I was near a bridge so I could limp there and be in shade, and wasn't too far away from a few exits (they can get sparse up there), so AAA could get to me quickly.

The bridge overhead turned out to be a somehow appropriate road:

Got the tire taken care of, made the appointment, got the work done, rested a few days in Portland.

While there, I got to see the other family animals, Bappers the cat:

And Sasha the dog (known to some of us as "Shasta" from a malaprop of my grandfather's):

So, got a little rest, then drove back for an Ambersons rehearsal on Sunday and then an Everything Must Go one last night - I needed to have both, but it wasn't fun with the post-wisdom teeth pulling pain. I canceled Spell rehearsal tonight as I didn't need it, and actually need to do more work on my own for the show to make any rehearsal work productive. Plus my mouth hurts.

The handout from the dentist says that I should expect the pain to get worse on days 3-5 after the work, but I've seen that before and it wasn't true then. It is now. Days 1-2 were no problem at all, but it has gotten worse and then slowly better since. Maybe just another day or two of this. I hope.

So I'll try and laugh at a few things. Ha. Ha.

I just gotta say, that there's one smooth-talking Siamese . . .

(Berit thinks that the kitty is Harry Robinson of "The Harry Robinson String Sound," but he looks to me like a music lover who knows what to play on the hi-fi to appeal to a fine woman)

In any case, that cat is cooler than this pair of 40-year old post-grads:

Did you know that Schlitz was a health food?

Again, Berit jumps in to note that this isn't exactly an incorrect claim - the pilgrims didn't move on from Plymouth to elsewhere because they ran out of beer - in times when water wasn't always so safe, beer was a good substitute.

And as Berit also likes to remind me, it's always good to remember when thinking about all the many many personages of history, and their works good and bad . . . they were, quite a bit of the time, drunk off their asses.

Finally, two pieces of Star Trek geek fun - two videos enumerating all the times Dr. Leonard McCoy used his two classic phrases:

( He's Dead, Jim )

( I'm a DOCTOR, not a . . . )

Enjoy. Ow.

Oh, yeah, there's stuff to share. A grab-bag. Lemme get rid of these things that are clogging up my blog reader, just sitting there, saved, mocking me, MOCKING me, I tell you . . .

(can you tell that I'm bored and nothing is coming to me as yet on the scripts I should be writing?)

First, I just saw on the TV that there's a National Geographic special coming up on the recently-unearthed scrapbooks of Karl Hoecker, adjutant to the commandant of Auschwitz - an amazing look into the heart of "the banality of evil." The New Yorker had an excellent article on the subject, which isn't online but there's an abstract HERE and a gallery of images from the scrapbook HERE.

This is certainly a fine, honorable, and serious subject for a TV special. It is, in some ways, nothing new (I've spent a lot of time and much of my work on the subject of how normal people do evil things), but more examples never hurt in getting this important idea across, which so many people try to ignore or reject.

However.

They have chosen one of the most unfortunate, badly-pitched titles for such a piece that I think they possibly could. I understand why they went with this title - the sentiment is appropriate - but I don't think they quite perceived how this would sound or read - I found out about this by hearing an announcer stentoriously read it at the end of a commercial and I cracked up, mistakenly thinking I had Comedy Central on or something and it was a joke - and right as I typed that sentence, they played the spot again and I broke up again.

See, they've titled the show:

NAZI SCRAPBOOKS FROM HELL

Again, I understand the title, but the effect of the combo of the words "Nazi" and "scrapbooks" (about as sweet and Norman Rockwell a word as I can think of) and the construction "FROM HELL" (for at least two decades now an appendage used on the end of innocent phrases in a parody of exploitation film hyperbole) is just NOT what the makers of the special were going for, I would imagine.

See, just then, right as I typed that last period, they ran the commercial AGAIN on the TV next to me, and I was all taken in and abashed and moved again until the title was read so, SO seriously, and then I lost my shit again. It doesn't get old, hearing one of "those voices" use the (sensitive, serious, sad) tone you do when you are, say, doing a promo for a Holocaust documentary and winding up with a title more appropriate for a Roger Corman film.

I get two images in my head - one is a cartoony image of some kind of Jim Henson's National Socialist Babies, with 'Lil Adolf 'n' Eva and Baby Goebbels and Goering and Himmler (with their faithful dog, Blondi) playing together and fighting over the glue sticks, crayons, rubber cement and sparkles as they make their scrapbooks of unbelievable monstrosities.

The other image is of sentient monster scrapbooks, dripping blood and ichor like in some EC comic book, wearing swastika armbands and wandering a suburban landscape, wreaking horror and havoc.

Maybe it's just me.

And speaking of "those voices," here's a video created for a Vegas industry gathering that features the unfamiliar faces of several of the most familiar voices in the USA:

( IN A WORLD . . . )

Some links of interest:

io9 has a nice post about the 1970s toys The Micronauts, which I had and loved (I got a giant, almost complete set for Xmas of 1976) which led me to two other Micronauts sites that brought back great memories, MicroHeritage and The Micronauts Homepage.

These toys were the BEST - great figures, vehicles, and playsets - loads of fun - with lots of moving parts, including neat plastic missiles that really fired with some power. Unfortunately, some dumb kid shot one of those cool cool supercool missiles into his throat and choked, and wound up spoiling toys for all of us for years after, which weren't allowed to have neat shooting missiles like that anymore. Actually, I think they were still able to have them, but they had to make them bigger with foam tips, and then some stupider kid choked on one of THOSE from an original Battlestar Galactica Viper toy (very cool, but I never had one), and that was IT for neat shooting stuff. Jeez, we used to throw Jarts around each other and get set on fire by Estes model rocket engines, and it was FUN!

Stupid clumsy kids . . .

From PingMag, "The Tokyo-Based Magazine About 'Design and Making Things'," an interview with and great set of photos by Frederic Chaubin of Soviet architecture of the 70s and 80s - some amazing buildings here, like sets from SF movies.

From Neatorama, "Mathematician Michael S. Schneider saw a wave form of the well-known drum sequence known as the Amen Break. It’s a drum 5.2 second sequence performed by Gregory Cylvester Coleman of The Winstons and has been sampled and used by countless artists since it was recorded in the 60s. Schneider, seeing the waveform through the eyes of a math professor, recognized a pattern, a relationship called the Golden Ratio. So he began to analyze the drum sequence and its deeper meaning."

Here's two found images I grabbed recently from other websites that collect "neat stuff," but I forgot to put down what sites those were. Oh, well.

Tyler Cannon pulled off quite a feat. Nice job, kid.

And please remember to bow down before The Lizard King:

From LP Cover Lover, a jacket that suggests that the best way to demonstrate high fidelity is by recording a deranged bikini-clad model talking to her hand puppet:

(and the sidebar . . . "Hunting thru Audioland with Gin and Chimera"? Wha?)

Dear god I WISH they would stop running that NAZI SCRAPBOOKS FROM HELL commercial every ten minutes or less on this channel - I guess the National Geographic channel (or, as they annoyingly call it in some promos, NatGeo - ugh) doesn't have a lot of sponsors, and there isn't anything else interesting on right now besides this (fascinating) show on a murderous chimpanzee.

Nice description of a movie from the onscreen channel guide for the Cable TV here, for Curse of the Fly (1965): "A mad scientist tries out a molecular disintegrator on people but cannot get the hang of it." Yeah, that can be a pain.

Here's a wonderfully classic sexist Folgers Instant Coffee ad:

( Sometimes a candle ISN'T Just a Candle . . . )

Paul Anka smells like teen spirit . . .

( A mul-LAT-to! An al-BI-no! A mos-QUIT-o! My lib-I-to! )

And if you haven't seen this one, which has been making the rounds, it's quite worth it . . .

( CHARLIE ROSE by Samuel Beckett )

And I hope the weather is as beautiful where you are as it is here.

( And pretty much everywhere, it's gonna be hot! )

Enjoy.

And another week done gone by.

Tonight, more Ambersons work.

Tomorrow, no work on shows, but off to a gallery opening of drawings by Ivy Dachman, my stepmother, in Pound Ridge, NY.

Sunday, watch a runthru of Babylon Babylon to figure out the lights, and more work on Everything Must Go in the evening.

Monday and Tuesday are nominally "off," but there's work I have to do on the lights for Babylon Babylon, and it looks like I need to see a dentist about pulling these last two wisdom teeth, one of which is giving me some problems - and figuring out if it will actually be cheaper for me to drive up to Maine and have the dentist I see up there do it rather than go someplace local (which seems to be the case, but I don't know if I can take off for two days at this point and deal with Babylon Babylon work).

So while I variously use what I have on hand to deal with the tooth pain (advil, vicodin, etodolac, single-malt scotch), a Friday Random Ten, from the 25,630 on the iPod:

1. "Your Generation" - Generation X - D.I.Y.: Anarchy in the UK - UK Punk I (1976-77)
2. "Editions of You" - Roxy Music - For Your Pleasure
3. "When Under Ether" - PJ Harvey - White Chalk
4. "It Ain't Me Babe" - Johnny Cash & June Carter - Man in Black 1963-69
5. "Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again" - Bob Dylan - Blonde on Blonde
6. "Mirror Freak" - Steve Harley & Cockney Rebel - The Human Menagerie
7. "Copy" - Plastics - Welcome Plastics
8. "Enthusiastic" - David Thomas - More Places Forever
9. "Lone Soul Road" - Sainte Anthony's Fyre - Sainte Anthony's Fyre
10. "Feel the Pain" - One of Hours - Diggin' For Gold - Vol. 10: A Collection of Demented 60's R&B/Punk & Mesmerizing 60's Pop

That was a great Randomosity to get me pepped up and less-miserable (I have to try and remember that "Editions of You" can always make me happy-peppy whenever I need it)!

And here's the Friday Cat Photos -- Hooker resenting me bugging him this morning while he's trying to take a nap on one of Berit's clothes shelves:

Moni resenting Berit trying to hold her still this morning for a nice picture for the blog:

And the two of them, beyond resentment, having a nice nap together last night:

Finally, two pieces of video humor. First, a silent piece of Flash animation imagining a phone conversation between a couple of pop stars:

( P Diddy Calls Bjork About a Duet )

And this was apparently all over the net a few days ago, but it wasn't anywhere I saw it immediately, so maybe you missed it, too - a side of the Muppets I'd never seen before:

( Beaker Sings Something Different )

(more info on this can be found HERE, if you need it)

Favorite quote from elsewhere today -- Warren Ellis and Ben Templesmith have an idea while chatting on Twitter (as reported on Ellis' site):

templesmith: I want Ray Winstone & Ian McShane in an hour long tv show where all they do is sit in a room & discuss how to kill ppl with cockney accents

warrenellis: we must write that show. Call your agents. It could be called THOSE BASTARDS.

templesmith: SOLD sir.

Back to work . . .

Various things seen and done . . .

First reading last night of Richard Foreman's Harry in Love: A Manic Vaudeville, for my August production, with the comparatively small cast of six. Went well, and the cast is damned good and has a good time mixing outside of the work as well. Some fine single-malt scotch was poured at the intermission break (thanks, Josephine!) and we had a well-lubricated time. Amazingly, the reading lasted one hour and 47 minutes -- when we originally performed the show, it ran two hours and 50 minutes, plus two intermissions. WAY too long, but we were doing the premiere production, so I felt we should do the complete play. Foreman's first comment (besides thanking me for the production) was that if I ever did it again, I should cut it, so I did. I cut 25 pages, which was less than I had hoped to, but they must have been the right 25 pages, because I certainly didn't expect to lose an hour with that - but I'm glad I did. It'll run a bit longer in performance, with business and so forth, but not too much longer (plus one intermission). A good length.

Another image from the Modern Mechanix blog with a headline that caused some hilarity around this home:

The hilarity was actually more from the fact that the moment Berit and I saw it, we began singing the intro to "The Immigrant Song" together without a pause.

Here's the video trailer for the Piper McKenzie production Babylon Babylon, opening soon at The Brick, which I'm lighting (and I appear briefly in the first minute of this trailer):

( On The Developmental Process )

There's also a blog for the show, HERE.

Jules Dassin, one of my favorite noir directors, has died at the age of 96. I've written enough obits recently, and plenty of people are paying tribute to this great filmmaker, so I won't go on about him too much.

He has been known best for many years for his later films Rififi and Topkapi. With the increased interest in noir (and fine rereleases from The Criterion Collection) the four great noirs he made, one a year, from 1947-1950, Brute Force, The Naked City, Thieves' Highway, and Night and the City, are now regarded as the best of his works. They are all essential noirs, and if you haven't seen them, I can't recommend them enough.

Consumer news: The new Region 1 DVD of Lynch's Lost Highway is pretty crappy and inferior to recent editions from France, England, and Germany - if you have a region-free player, go for one of those (I have the German edition, which is bare-bones and quite cheap, if you can find it).

Also, I'm making my way through the Complete Monty Python's Flying Circus 16-Ton Megaset DVD box set, and, besides looking better than I've ever seen them, the episodes are turning out to be more complete than I've ever seen them before -- I've watched every episode multiple times, on PBS, cable channels, VHS tape, laserdisk, and earlier DVD editions, I practically know them all by heart, and this new set has little bits and pieces throughout that have been sliced from the episodes for years. It's kinda weird (but great!) seeing these episodes for the umpteenth time and seeing new bits (and entire sketches!) that are brand-new to me.

Sean Rockoff told me that when he saw MPFC on channel 13 back in the 70s when they first ran it, there were still some Gilliam animations in a few episodes that have always been cut since (and I've read about them elsewhere) -- I'm expecting to see them show up when those episodes come around.

UPDATE: Nope. The three edited animation segments were still edited, even though lots of other little bits and pieces I've never seen before keep showing up (fewer and fewer as the series goes on). And while I'm glad to see all these pieces restored, it turns out that there's some other cuts/replacements as well - apparently for music rights issues (though for some reason, Graham Chapman's rendition of "Girl from Ipanema" in one episode is dubbed over with "I Dream of Jeannie With The Light Brown Hair," but is left in when sung by Cleese and Chapman in another).

I DID finally find one of the cut animation segments on YouTube, and here it is:

( A Bad Connection on Line 422 )

We've wound up with a night off we didn't expect. More Python and ordering in take-out. Nice.

I had been thinking of posting some cute funny videos today, when I opened up the Times Arts section in my blogreader and was hit in the face by an obit headline for Paul Arthur.

That Times obit is HERE.

Paul was a Cinema Studies teacher at NYU/Tisch School of the Arts during my first two years there. I had two classes with him and spent a lot of time in discussion with him after his lectures. He was a terrific teacher and lecturer, a funny guy, who loved loved loved film and loved to talk film. I used to occasionally run into him at film screenings in the late 80s, after he left NYU - he always seemed to be present at any screening of films by George and Mike Kuchar, as I also was at that time, so we'd say hi and check in. I probably last saw him around 1990, but I've never since seen his name in print, on an article or mentioned in passing, without smiling and thinking fondly of him.

He was the lecturer in my first Cinema Studies class, the basic class that all students in the Cinema Studies and Film Production departments had to take (I was in the latter). He showed a mix of classic Hollywood, some foreign films, short subjects, and experimental films, and it was the last that especially caused him to be either endeared or hated by his students - mainly, the freshmen Film Production students, my classmates, who turned out to be some of the most closed-minded people around when it came to film.

This was late 1986. That doesn't seem like such a great time for film, maybe, but in my first term at NYU the films playing in New York that many of us students were running to see included Wenders' Wings of Desire, Cox's Sid & Nancy, Jarmusch's Down By Law, Laurie Anderson's Home of the Brave, David Byrne's True Stories, X: The Unheard Music, Lech Kowalski's D.O.A. (which apparently was from 1980, but it seemed to be getting some kind of "big release" again that term, taking over at the Bleecker Street Playhouse after Wings had left), and, of course, Blue Velvet. As well as the many many great double bills going on at all of the rep houses around NYU (there were more than there were first-run houses in the Village at that time, with Cinema Village, Film Forum, Thalia Soho, and Theatre 80 St. Marks all going strong, and the Waverly and Bleecker Street also joining in with midnight shows).

Now, besides the early negative reaction to some of what Paul Arthur was sharing, the other sign that many of my classmates were rather conservative when it came to new experiences in the filmic arts was how many of them just plain despised the Lynch film, and wanted everybody to know this, in as many classes as they could find a way to bring it up. It became apparent that while some of us were rushing out to see the films above, many of my classmates were having a fine time at other things that year like Ruthless People or Down and Out in Beverly Hills or Platoon or Ferris Bueller's Day Off or Aliens - some of which I really really like, but . . .

So, Paul showed a mix of things. At our first lecture, he showed Douglas Sirk's All That Heaven Allows as an example of how a big, glossy Hollywood entertainment could actually have a lot going on on many levels. He also started the lecture by pulling out a reel of 35mm movie film he had found discarded on the street, and encouraging us to come down at the break or after class and touch it, grab it, rip a piece of it off and take it home, taste it - saying that you couldn't really understand and love film unless you understood and loved the actual physicality of film, the actual strip that moves through a projector (to feel, as Tim Lucas once called it in another context, "the emotion of the emulsion"). I wound it in my hands and tore off a strip with deliberate brutality; I think I still have it in a box somewhere (it appears to be nature footage of a turtle crawling through grass). I think he showed an experimental short before the Sirk, but nothing that caused anything but bemusement in the majority of students (wait a minute, I just remembered - it was Stan Brakhage's Mothlight! - and he showed it twice because it's so short).

That changed the following week.

Before the feature on week two, Paul showed a short film by Peter Kubelka, and noted that we were going to see most of Kubelka's films over the course of the term - as he had made so few films, and most of them were very short, it would give us the chance to see almost all of one filmmaker's work, as well as the variety of other films we'd be seeing.

He then showed us Kubelka's film Arnulf Rainer. Now, Kubelka was commissioned to make a film about the painter, however, as was apparently the pattern in his career with almost all of his films, he got the money and commission by swearing he wasn't going to go off and do another abstract film, and then he went off and did another abstract film.

Arnulf Rainer consists of black leader, clear leader, white noise, and silence, cut into precise metric patterns (I believe the pattern in the sound is the reverse of the pattern in the images). Amazingly to me, someone has actually put it up on YouTube, though it's a pretty lousy print and copy (and there's absolutely no way that can replicate the sensory experience of seeing this projected on film on a great big screen, which is really the point of the piece):

( Peter Kubelka's ARNULF RAINER )

Well, that didn't go over too well with the film students who wanted to be watching something a little more plot-driven (and Paul showed this one twice in a row, too, to audible groans). The fact that even if you don't like the Kubelka, you could learn something from it didn't occur to many of them - at a pure, basic level, it can teach you how suspense can be built through editing with nothing but black and white as images ("wait a minute, the screen's gone black for a while now - will the white come back? AH! There it is!").

Excerpts from some emails this morning to and from friend since 1986, and roommate 1986-1988, Sean Rockoff, who took Paul's intro course one year after me:

ME: . . . I remember you got Rear Window at your first class, and I'm trying to remember whether he showed Duck Amuck with that or not (I know that he showed that cartoon to both of our classes, and one of us got it before Citizen Kane, but I'm not sure which one of us it was).

I also remember he left halfway through the term while you were taking his course, and there seemed to be the feeling it was because he was being asked to dumb down his course for the film production students.
SEAN: . . . I know I got to see Duck Amuck in his class, and before I read the rest of your sentence I'd recalled it being paired with Citizen Kane, but I don't remember seeing Kane in the class. So I'm either remembering you telling me about it, or I've seen Kane so many times I just don't remember that specific one. Or, we both had the experience.

I do remember most of the class seemed to have an antagonistic relationship with his ideas of film as art (and he occasionally got angry with them as well). He tried to get across, in a frightfully short period of time, all the various concepts film could carry and all the different ways one could see and read any particular piece of film, and most of the class seemed to be there to learn how to make a commercial three-act movie. Not that there's necessarily anything wrong with that, but they refused to see any value at all in Arthur's not-exactly-revolutionary view that film could be so much more, and as students we should be exposed to as many different and challenging examples as possible. This reached a peak when we saw Wavelength; there was very nearly a riot. I loved it, but the near-constant catcalls added a level to the soundtrack I don't believe was intended.

Of course, all those kids who saw absolutely no value in Wavelength, being forced to watch it, any of society's resources being expended in archiving it, that the filmmaker was allowed to breathe the planet's air while making it, those kids are probably all making small fortunes producing sitcoms, and here I am, er, not. Still trying to raise funds to shoot a romantic comedy entirely on Reese's Peanut Butter Cups.

It wouldn't surprise me at all if he left because he was asked to dumb down the course, in response to complaints from those very students.
ME: Thanks - I'll include some of your thoughts in the post (your second paragraph puts a lot of what I was hoping to say together in a pithier way than I probably would).

Yeah, I think you got Duck Amuck with Rear Window at your first class, and I got the Jones cartoon with Kane halfway through the term - and we both got a riot during Wavelength (though I recall mine from the year before being more violent - people were throwing things at the screen and in the air by the end).

I remember Harry Elfont posting two pieces of photo paper on the wall in the first term 35mm photo class (where you and I met) - one unexposed and white, one exposed to full black, and saying it was a tribute to Peter Kubelka . . . which wound up becoming a mocking discussion of experimental film and Paul's "pretensions" from the class (in which, I'm sorry to say, Daniel Kazimierski [Sean's and my teacher] joined in), and which made me want to rabbit punch our classmates in their respective necks.

Of course, as you basically note, Harry Elfont is now off in Hollywood making the candy-colored happythings he always planned on and we've got integrity and not much else. I think I've reached a state of peace about that at least.
SEAN: No Commercial Potential! The Present-Day Formalist Refuses To Die!

(I should note, in fairness, that Harry Elfont was always a really nice guy and I enjoy some of his candy-colored happythings a lot - and the photo paper joke was actually pretty funny, even if the feeling behind it wasn't)

And, yes, as mentioned above, about three-quarters of the way through the term Paul showed us Michael Snow's classic 1967 film Wavelength.

If you don't know the film, you can follow the wikipedia link in the previous sentence, or go HERE for more info, though there's some inaccurate information in both descriptions (the latter page also seems to include multiple clips from the film - only one of which I could get to work). Sorry, but I'll also have to describe it at some length to have some context for the reaction of Paul's class to it.

Basically, the film consists of "one shot" (which is really many many shots, broken up, shot on different days with different film stocks, exposures, and filters) - 45 minutes long - starting with a wide shot from across an 80 foot-long loft on Canal Street towards the wall and windows opposite:

Gradually, the frame moves across the length of the loft, coming in closer and closer to a picture on the wall, which was just barely a dot in the opening frame. Over the course of the move (some of which is done with a zoom, some with new camera placement) there are four "human events" which occur - two workmen bring in a bookcase and put it against a wall; two women enter, turn on a radio and listen to it ("Strawberry Fields Forever" - which I just realized had to have been deliberately put in later, as it wasn't released at the time the film was shot - I always figured it was what was actually on the radio), then leave; a man (filmmaker and theorist Hollis Frampton) enters in distress and falls on the floor, apparently dead; and a nervous woman enters and calls "Richard" on the phone to tell him about the (now unseen) dead body on the floor - she is played by critic Amy Taubin, who was married at the time to Richard Foreman, who (FUN FACT) told me personally that yes, he's on the other end of that phone call.

The camera keeps moving. Night has fallen. Images are overlaid, repeated. The whole things is scored with the sound of an electrical tone - a wavelength - rising and falling, in pitch and volume, from almost inaudible to earsplitting. Eventually the frame reaches the other wall where (SPOILER ALERT!) the photograph fills the frame entirely - it is a photo of waves crashing on a beach that we have traveled the length of the loft to look at.

( 9:55 from near the end of Michael Snow's WAVELENGTH )

Okay. This isn't a film for everybody. I am aware of that. I completely understand why many, maybe most, people would be bored stupid by this. Fine. But I'd have thought a group of NYU film students would maybe be a tad more open-minded.

I had first seen Wavelength two years prior, when it was shown in a film class at my boarding school. I wasn't in the class, as I was a Junior and the class was only open to Seniors, but I was friendly with the teachers and they let me watch it as I had heard of it, was fascinated by the idea of it, and really wanted to see it. I sat through two classes and watched it twice in one day, loving it. And in fact, the students in the class all appreciated it as well, and it played great. The teachers were playing it in conjunction with two films they were showing in the course proper that they felt were referencing it in their respective final shots; The Passenger and The Shining. I think the comparison to the Antonioni film is dicey and pushing it, but once you've seen Wavelength next to the final shot of the Kubrick film it's pretty clear that Stanley was aware of the earlier film (especially in the way that once the photo in each film fills the frame, there are several slow dissolves to details of the photo).

So a bunch of Massachusetts boarding school students looking to get an easy grade by taking a film class as an elective Senior English class all liked the film. How about some NYU film students?

By 10 minutes in they were audibly upset. By 15 minutes in they were yelling sparsely. By 30 minutes the walkouts started, often accompanied by cries of "Bullshit!" Then things started being thrown at the screen (which was just a big concave concrete wall painted white in this basement lecture hall) - some empty coffee cups, a cup of ice, and a number of shoes and notebooks. Crumpled paper flew through the air. People started yelling nonsense sounds in a "la-la-la-la-can't-hear-you" manner.

The film ended and most of the audience walked out and didn't come back after the break. Some did and yelled at Paul during the discussion period ("That was just masturbation!"). After that and the class was over, I went down to talk to Paul (as a number of us always did at the end of class - we'd all usually wind up walking out of the building and on to 4th Street together, still talking over the evening's viewing). He was a bit stunned, and very disappointed, but it also seemed he was kind of amazed and pleased, with a glint in his eye, that a film - a film, for chrissakes, and one made almost 20 years ago at that point, a classic of the avant-garde, even quaint in 1986 - could cause such a visceral, violent reaction. There was something of joy in how we all felt - those who loved the film - that somehow this really really showed how powerful a film could be. It made you love the medium even more.

When I ran into Paul in the years after at the Collective or Millennium or where ever, he'd always take a moment to try and remember where he knew me from, and eventually get it with a smile: "Right, you were there at the Wavelength riot!"

As alluded to above, there were rumors around the school that Paul was being pressured to simplify his course and be a little less extreme in his film choices, for the sake of the poor delicate film production students - I have NO idea how true this was, but I do remember, even if he doesn't, Sean's account from the time of Paul's final lecture, where he said a few words about the film, a few words about teaching, then said, with some bitterness, "Well, that's that" and walked out of the lecture hall as the film started, never to come back.

But there were some of us who appreciated Paul Arthur, certainly, at that time and place. He helped me understand the JOY of film - of making, watching, appreciating, writing about, whatever, film with a great love of it in your heart, never distanced from it, never critical without empathy, never sneering at passion. His class also introduced me to Renoir's Rules of the Game and Wyler's The Best Years of Our Lives, as well as Peter Kubelka and Hans Richter's Ghosts Before Breakfast, for which I'll always be grateful.

I will miss the feeling I got when seeing his byline on a new piece in some film journal, and smiling, and remembering him. I'm glad I knew him when and where I did.

UPDATE: There is also a lovely classified notice from his family in the Times HERE - being from those who knew and loved him best, it captures the man I knew far better than I could. I had intended to describe Paul as "bearlike" at some point above and forgot, so I'm glad to see the bear listed here as his "talismanic animal." Extremely appropriate.

Finally got this uploaded . . .

At The Brick's 5th Anniversary party, back in December, Berit and I did a little live performance piece accompanied by a video playing behind us.

The stage was covered with sixteen chairs, evenly spaced in three rows facing the audience (5/6/5). As each of our pre-recorded voices alternated on the video, we would take turns slowly walking around the stage -- each of us ending our little segment by knocking over a chair, one-by-one, until at last the stage was covered with overturned chairs (some had been carefully tipped, some knocked, a couple thrown, and one smashed over and over into the ground and destroyed) and the two of us wound up facing each other over the last chair, which was not overturned, as the lights faded (we had created the light cues in the computer board so that Berit could start the DVD of the video and hit the go button on the light board 5 seconds later - then run down the ladder from the booth and to the stage to perform the piece - and the lights and video would sync up).

It was designed and intended completely as a live video/performance combo, so the video doesn't exactly work on its own (it's basically a slideshow of text with voiceovers), but I'm happy enough with it to share it with you. It was much liked by a number of people there (who might not want me to say so in public), and got a little heckling afterward as well ("More facile statements!").

I created the soundtrack and designed the overall piece. Berit created the text slides (from my design suggestion of copying Godard/Gorin's titles in Tout Va Bien) and put the whole thing together as a movie.

Here it is behind the cut. It's close to 11 minutes long.

( Where Do You Stand? )

Enjoy.

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.

Tomorrow we start work on the Gemini CollisionWorks shows for 2008. First reading of Ambersons. We will have 15 people out of the 18 people cast (and 21 people that we need) there. That's pretty good, considering how difficult it is to get everyone together with conflicts as they are (I'm going to have the Ambersons cast together in full a total of five times before we open).

Today I have to go get scripts copied and do some sound editing (since I'd like to play the Herrmann score under the reading, and some of the tracks run together in ways that won't work so well for that).

The scheduling seems to be working better than I'd anticipated. A couple of big problems have come up for a couple people, but mostly I'm getting responses back with either "Oh, here's a couple of conflicts that have come up since my last email" or "All looks good. Great!"

Of course, I've only got back 18 responses from the 43 actors cast in the four shows as yet, so I might be looking ahead to big problems, but for now I won't "borrow trouble," as Berit always reminds me.

Currently in the iPod, 25,512 songs. Here's what comes up this morning:

1. "Cha Cha Heels" - Eartha Kitt - downloaded from somewhere, god knows where, probably the WFMU website
2. "Ingen Visjoner" - Haerverk - Stengt pga av haerverk 7" EP
3. "Batucada Erotica" - Michel Colombier - Bananatico: European Airlines to Rio
4. "Sofa #2" - Frank Zappa - The Best Band You Never Heard In Your Life
5. "Repetition" - The Au Pairs - mix disk from Daniel McKleinfeld
6. "Burn Bridges Burn" - The Fugs - The Fugs Final CD (Part 1)
7. "Rene" - The Small Faces - Ogdens' Nut Gone Flake
8. "Stake Out" - The Negatives - Stake Out / Love Is Not Real 7"
9. "Picture of Dorian Gray" - The Futureheads - 1-2-3-Nul!
10. "Pick It Up (And Put It In Your Pocket)" - Stan Ridgway - The Big Heat

And this week's kitty photos -- here's Moni on the bed:

And with Hooker on Berit's suitcase:

And since I've still got a backlog of videos to share, behind the cut are three live performances from Mr. Iggy Pop. First, a 1977 rendition of "The Passenger" in Manchester, England (unfortunately it kinda peters out at the end as it cuts off with the transition to the next song). Then, a short and sweet performance of "I Wanna Be Your Dog" from a 1979 Old Grey Whistle Test.

And finally, Iggy & The Stooges from their performance at this year's Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductions. Oh, no, they weren't inducted, yet again. However, that fine Detroit girl Madonna was, and she herself requested (apparently in protest at them being ignored again) that her hometown boys be the ones to perform her songs at the ceremony. So The Stooges performed "Burning Up" and "Ray of Light" for an obviously pleased Madonna and some confused-looking record company weasels (though there seems to be enough fans in the audience to give them a pretty good ovation at the end). The Stooges and Madonna. Below.

( I'm So Messed Up, I Want You Here )

Enjoy.

Writer-director-producer of film and theatre Anthony Minghella has died in one of those tragic little random accidents of the world - complications following routine minor surgery. He was 54.

He directed three features that really impressed me as they were all in categories of film that I usually avoid as they drive me nuts, and he did great things with them: Truly, Madly, Deeply, The English Patient, and The Talented Mister Ripley. Three really really good films, those.

He also made a short film that I find most remarkable, as it shouldn't work at all. He directed Samuel Beckett's Play for the Beckett on Film project of several years ago.

Now I love Beckett, especially post-1963 Beckett. Play may be my favorite theatre text of all time (the other contenders for this are also Beckett: Not I and Rockaby). I am a bit fanatical in my feelings about how Beckett's work should be performed. I may be a theatre director who feels that directors should have a pretty wide latitude it terms of textual interpretation, sure, but that you only go as far as you can while remaining true to the text, or illuminating it in some way. With Beckett, sure, you can add things, if you like, and ignore stage directions. However, you should be aware that when it comes to Sam you almost certainly will be WRONG and MAKING BAD THEATRE. I don't think there's another playwright I'd say that about with complete certainty.

And to my mind, making a film of a Beckett theatre text is a BAD THING. Beckett write plays specifically for theatre and radio and television, and one film. And he understood all of those media. He also wrote prose and poetry and I'm nauseated by the apparently common idea that those works of his also belong on a stage. He did in each separate medium what worked best in that medium, and they should stay that way. No matter how well done, it is still Doing Well What Ought Not To Be Done At All.

That said . . . he did supervise a BBC TV version of Not I, which . . . ain't the play but it's nice to hear Billie Whitelaw's voice (and see her mouth) do it. And I do indeed have all sixteen of the Beckett on Film movies on tape and watch my favorites with some regularity -- there are only a couple of outright clunkers in the bunch (Footfalls and, unfortunately, Rockaby at the top of that list), a couple of boring versions of lesser works, a number of so-so films of excellent performances (Not I, That Time, and A Piece of Monologue especially), some good films that aren't altogether true to the plays but adapt them well enough (Mamet's version of Catastrophe, Charles Sturridge's version of Ohio Impromptu with Jeremy Irons) and two outright great films that find cinematic ways to adapt Beckett that really work (Damien O'Donnell's What Where and the Minghella).

So here, behind the cut, is Anthony Minghella's film of Samuel Beckett's Play, featuring Kristin Scott-Thomas, Alan Rickman, and Juliet Stevenson -- and I'll be putting most of my video and photo entries behind LJ cuts from now on, as I've been getting complaints about loading errors and crashes from people trying to look at my page (mainly with Firefox users, it seems) since I've been including more of these things here. Hopefully this will reduce the problems.

( PLAY )

Enjoy. RIP AM.

Today, B & I have pretty much nothing to do. This is her first day off in weeks and weeks, and she's spending most of it passed out and recovering from illness. I am spending it awake, and in the middle of illness. And sending out lots and lots of casting emails. 30 so far. Waiting to hear back from the "first wave" before I move on to the second, if I need to.

Yesterday, I ran lights for 3800 Elizabeth. Here's what I needed by the light board to get me through it:

(that's tea in the cup)

So, made it through that, feeling only a bit feverish and uncomfortable by the end. As long as I keep up with the Advil and Robitussin, I seem to hold the worst of the symptoms at bay.

Maybe I can find some good and inspirational movies to watch. In the meantime, here's a couple of Star Wars-geeky videos that have come up by chance today in various surfs around.

( Now behind a cut for easier loading . . . )

Enjoy.

Well, the horrible sickness that's been all over Berit for most of the week, and seemed to be just lingering in me at a low, tolerable level, has decided to come forth in all its glory for me today, with wracking coughs, joint pain, tissue aches, and a head that both pounds and is light and confused.

I was supposed to be at 3800 Elizabeth rehearsal today as stage manager, but had to call and beg off at around 10.30 am, feeling a little guilty as I wasn't quite so bad at that point. By an hour later, no guilt about it, I'm really sick.

And, unfortunately, I am going to have to go in tonight to Tribeca to help out with the Cat's Cradle box office as promised, mainly because I'm hoping to have a chance to audition someone from that company for Ambersons before the show. I don't know if I'll be staying for the show as I'd hoped, though. Tomorrow I have rehearsal and performance of 3800 in the afternoon and evening, and if I can't audition that person tonight, I'll have to do it at The Brick at 10.30 am tomorrow morning. I'll need rest.

I keep falling asleep for little unexpected naps and having unpleasantly specific dreams about having car accidents (swerving to avoid hitting a dog at Ditmas and Ocean Parkway and heading for the trees; taking a turn on the BQE a little too fast and sideswiping into the crash resisters at the southbound construction point where the road is temporarily forked; etc.) - and I always wake up right at the decisive point where I will either definitely have the accident or might just possibly avoid it, which leaves a horrible feeling of unfinishedness in my waking self.

And of course I'll be driving into Manhattan later tonight as the F Train is screwed up this weekend. Nice.

Last night we finished the shoot on Daniel's video with the one-shots of me in the kitchen scene. Pretty quick, pretty simple. I got to see the rushes of the slasher movie footage we shot on Wednesday, and it looked even better than I expected. Hysterical. Daniel sent me some frame captures from the footage we shot Thursday, in the basement and on the stoop - in the last post you got to see what the lighting actually looked like on the set, so here's what it looked like in the camera:

That's me as the slasher film director with my crew.

And there I am, freezing, on the stoop outside (hiding a knife behind my back, being paranoid).

This has to be done for a contest by early next week, so hopefully it will be somewhere online soon enough for me to point you to.

The book I'm reading that keeps sending me to sleep (not a reflection on the book, but on the difficulty of reading right now) is This Is Orson Welles, his interviews with Peter Bogdanovich from the 60s-70s. I often remember this as more of a collection of Welles' tall tales and fabulisms than it is (don't get me wrong, Welles' stories are often better than the truth, but they get tired once you've read them a dozen times). There's a lot of gold in Welles' observations. Two passages stood out to me this time, regarding current or recent concerns of mine - this first, recorded in a restaurant in Rome in 1969:

PETER BOGDANOVICH: You've been quoted as saying the theatre is on its last legs--
ORSON WELLES: Sure . . .
PB: --but that it's always been dying.
OW: Everybody's said that, ever since the Greeks. The Fabulous Invalid, that was what Kaufman and Hart called the theatre. They wrote a play with that title, and one of the characters was based on me, I'm proud to say . . . for the record, I hope I didn't seem to be saying that the theatre is finished. Great artists continue to perform in it, but it's no longer hooked up to the main powerhouse. Theatre persists as one of those divine anachronisms -- like grand opera (which I much prefer) and classical ballet (which I don't really dig at all). A performing art, more than a creative one, a source of joy and wonder, but not a thing of now.
PB: The "thing of now," of course, being film?
OW: Number One. And then there's television, still largely undiscovered territory . . .
PB: How about radio?
OW: An abandoned mine.
PB: That means radio has become another anachronism?
OW: Sure, like silent movies -- a victim of technological restlessness. Radio still functions in a way, of course; but the silents are wiped out. That's like giving up all watercolors because somebody invented oil paint. And black-and-white is going the same silly route. For me, radio's a personal loss, I miss it very much . . .

I am a bit wistful for the time (which I still remember the tail end of) when film was "the thing of now."

This next bit (recorded in Hollywood, late 1970s) must have stuck in my mind in conceiving Ian W. Hill's Hamlet:

PB: You said [Shakespeare] wasn't interested in the bourgeoisie.
OW: That was an age, you see, where there was lots of room at the top. In his plays, the common folk are mainly clowns.
PB: You'd say he was a snob.
OW: He was a country boy, the son of a butcher, who'd made it into court. He spent years getting himself a coat of arms. He wrote mostly about kings. We can't have a great Shakespearian theatre in America anymore, because it's impossible for today's American actors to comprehend what Shakespeare meant by "king." They think a king is just a gentleman who finds himself wearing a crown and sitting on a throne.

I was also going to post a couple of videos of Marianne Faithfull at different points of her career, but I need something more cheerful, so here are three videos to laugh at, laugh with, and get all touched by.

( Now behind a cut for easier loading . . . )

Oh, boy, I'm getting woozy here. Better lie down and put on a video or something and rest a bit. I've been thinking of watching Terry Gilliam's Brazil, but that might be a hair too nightmarish in my present state.

Ah, who am I kidding, that's exactly how I like it. Brazil it is then . . .

More videos (and especially song performance videos) have been showing up in my YouTube favorites lately. And since I've been seeing more performances I've wanted to save and watch again, I might as well include them here, too.

( Now behind a cut for easier loading . . . )

(sorry if any of these wind up vanishing - they don't always wind up staying posted)

Well, I - or extensions of me - have been showing up elsewhere online.

In the one that I was expecting, and had mentioned before, the interview I did with Jon Stancato of Stolen Chair Theatre Company is now up at ArtRadio: WPS1.org -- you can hear it HERE.

I think this is a pretty good half-hour discussion (they thankfully cut the 30 second lull where I went up on anything to say, having jumped to the "finale" question five minutes too early). It mainly works because Jon is so together in talking about his company and their work - I just have to suggest something slightly and he goes off into talking quite articulately about it, and without sounding "prepared."

As for me, Berit just cracked up on hearing my intro, saying that I had completely gone over-the-top into "NPR-land," and that I sounded like I was in one of those Alec Baldwin SNL sketches about the "Schwetty Balls." Yeah, true. I think I was a hair nervous to start, and put on a "radio voice" to feel comfortable doing this (it's not a Firesign Theatre voice, but it comes from the same part of my brain that pulls out those voices and characters so easily). I get looser and sound more like myself as the program goes on. Though Berit also points out my annoying "you know" vocal tic. Ugh.

I was worried immediately after the recording that I had "inserted" myself into the discussion too much, which was supposed to be about Stolen Chair, of course, but as Jon had specifically asked me to do this as a fellow theatre artist, I felt I had to turn it into a discussion a few times rather than a straight "interview." Still, I was really uncomfortable about it right after the recording, but listening to it now, it seems like just about the right amount of me in proportion to Jon.

I wince a bit at the way I say I've been doing this much longer than Jon, 10 years, and he notes that he's been doing it for 6, which isn't so much of a difference - but I think I was including in my head the 8 or 9 years or dithering around as solely an actor and techie-for-hire before I got myself together to start producing and directing my own shows, which he (smartly) never went through. I still felt like "the old guy" who took forever to get himself even slightly together (and still really isn't) talking to the younger guy who was really together right out of the gate and is on his way to bigger things.

In the end, a nice piece about Stolen Chair, I think.

To my surprise, one of my snow photos of Gravesend, Brooklyn wound up in a post at a favorite Brooklyn site, The Gowanus Lounge.

Then I was surprised to find my digital camera videos getting more hits than expected on YouTube. Not much, but not what I expected just from posting them here. Turns out they had also wound up in a post at Gowanus Lounge. Nice.

I've seen five people thus far in auditions (and, amazingly, all good thus far) - seeing more tomorrow and Saturday. Today, Wednesday, and Thursday, I'm lighting and acting in a short video for Daniel McKleinfeld. I think I'm coming down with something (I have an odd-feeling throat, as does Berit - she thought it was just from working long hours in the moldy basement of Walkerspace, but it's looking less likely), so I should stay well away from auditioners and fellow actors.

And I have to get to work on Penny Dreadful. Let alone finish with casting my shows. How did I get this busy right now? I was supposed to be able to leisurely get my shows together right about now . . .

Good auditions today for Ambersons. Seeing more people tomorrow and on Tuesday. Now, home alone (with cats), enjoying downtime. Might as well clean out the bin of things I've been wanting to share . . .

First, the link to an article I enjoyed at Neatorama on the evolution of car logos.

Next, fun aboard the Starship Enterprise, as that 1960s view of the future is combined with another 60s icon to surprisingly appropriate effect . . .

( Now behind a cut for easier loading . . . )

Enjoy.