Sanity test
March 2nd, 2011This test helps you determine your knowledge of the wackiest commentators of today, Charlie Sheen, Muammar Qaddafi, and Glenn Beck. It’s amazing how interchangeable their lines are.
Troubles in paradise
March 1st, 2011A couple of updates, both of them about seeming Edens that are becoming despoiled before us:
First, on my posts about Mike Daisey’s show “The Agony & The Ecstasy of Steve Jobs,” which I posted about here and here, I submit this interview with Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak about the show. Wozniak was profoundly moved — and troubled — by what he saw, and is struggling with what to do about it. Which made me think of Wallace Shawn’s lifelong struggle with guilt about, well, seemingly everything. Except Wozniak seems determined to do something about it, but isn’t yet clear what that something will be.
Secondly, I direct you to another take on what I’m calling “Dark Archie,” a recent trend toward updating Archie and his Riverdale pals to the dark side, as was done with every other character in comics in the 1980’s. Here was my initial take on that, and here was the update. Now someone provides us with this trailer of what a movie about the teenage Dark Archie might look like. With regard to Jughead, Moose, and Dilton, it all now makes so much sense.
The agony and the ecstacy of Apple products
February 27th, 2011Mike Daisey’s on-stage investigation of Apple and its impact on the world, which closes today at Berkeley Rep, continues to make waves in the tech sphere, as this piece in today’s New York Times shows. I didn’t get to see it while it was running in the Bay Area — as ideal a home for it, I think, as Hamlet found his uncle’s court to be when he wanted to see his little play staged — but I suspect I will in some place, at some time: It now moves on to Woolly Mammoth in Washington, DC, and then Seattle Rep.
While I’m somewhat on the subject, I should note that I’m writing this from a MacBook Pro while snowbound in the mountains above Banning, California. I have a wifi signal — although it’s iffy — but my AT&T iPhone can’t connect to the cellular network. One of the regulars here asked a highly placed AT&T executive about getting cellphone coverage up here. His response, I was told: “Get Verizon.”
Super, cheaper
February 25th, 2011Can’t swing the money to see that Broadway show featuring everybody’s favorite web-slinger? You’re in luck: Here’s information about the five-buck Spider-Man alternative, which in addition to being super cheaper, includes beer.
The future is here
February 23rd, 2011And it’s asking, “Who moved my cheese?” This first “cyborg” is operated by a mouse brain — actually, a number of mouse brains stitched together. I love technology — and I’m surprised to find that this little video saddens and frightens me.
I couldn’t help thinking about the mouse’s “soul” — which I find I do believe in, as we understand it, and which is housed (or manifested) by the brain, at least while it’s “here.” (Clearly, I need to do some further thinking about this. Because I haven’t yet squared the functions of the brain with the location of “the soul,” against my other belief: in an afterlife.) In any event, watching the “cyborg” scurry about, I had the same response I’m sure everyone will: That it looked like a mouse trying to find its way out. Which made me think that that is a sad, lonely, and tortuous experience for the mouse. I say this also realizing that I’m personifying a thing that I’m not sure is “alive,” and that I’m also not sure how to define “life.” This, against the context of an often human-seeming robot beating two “Jeopardy” champs handily last week. We’re all going to have more and more of our assertions challenged by Artificial Intelligence and artificial/organic symbiosis.
Thoughts about that?
It’s not the response I would have expected from myself.
Putting things into perspective
February 23rd, 2011I’m sharing this interactive scale of the universe tool to help people get a better sense of perspective. It is indeed eye-opening, although it has one flaw, a bad one: I’m not drawn large enough. I hope they can fix that.
Today’s surprise video find that I kinda had something to do with, but 20 years ago
February 23rd, 2011I just came across this new video about Moving Arts, the theatre company I co-founded in 1992. You know you’ve built something successful when now you find out by accident about marketing initiatives like this, when you’re even name-checked in the video, and you had no idea about it previously. (In other words: They don’t need me any more. Sniff sniff.)
By the way, I saw the one-act festival mentioned herein last week and there’s some terrific work in it. I’m sure that at some point I’ll be stealing that set-design concept, which ingenuously unifies the five plays. Here’s where to get tickets.
Constructive criticism
February 21st, 2011We’re less than two weeks out from The One-Day New Play Playwriting Workshop I’m running with Trey Nichols. Click here for more info. To answer some anticipated questions: no, you don’t have to already be a playwright to enroll; yes, actors do well with this; and no, we don’t give feedback in this style:
How I spent Saturday
February 20th, 2011This weekend I was supposed to take my wife and two kids to a mountaintop family resort in Banning, CA for RV camping, fishing, barbecuing, hiking, and playing in the snow — man-made snow that they were having trucked in. But my wife broke her toe, so hiking was out; then they informed us that the fishing was off because they had to drain the lake to clear reeds; then we were informed that the man-made snow was canceled because rain looked likely; and just when my wife and I were trying to envision four days and three nights in an RV with squabbling siblings and no wifi, I was contacted by two board members of the resort and the executive director that maybe we shouldn’t come because it looked like there was going to be a massive snowfall — of snow generated the old-fashioned, natural way — and we would be either snowed in, or stuck on the mountain trying to get in. So instead we stayed home and watched “Fringe” and other things Friday night.
On Saturday, newly unscheduled, I decided to tackle some chores:
- putting the year’s worth of unread “Hulk” and “Incredible Hulk” comics into chronological order so that I can read them later
- taking all 20 of my unlaundered dress shirts to the dry cleaner’s
- getting together all my tax records for my CPA; this took four hours
- cleaning my email in-box down to 58 emails I need to respond to — that’s real progress
- editing something I’m writing for publication
- sending my revised bio to the nice people at the Great Plains Theatre Conference
- buying beer and beef sticks
- buying a form-molding pillow for my bed, and a form-molding bath pillow for the bath, because yes, my neck is still killing me off-and-on from the car accident four months ago
- buying a soldering iron so that I could fix a shoe buckle and a belt buckle
- coming home to do that soldering, abetted by my daughter who has learned in school to solder far better than I ever did
- reading the new issue of New Avengers
- taking a long jacuzzi bath, during which I tested out that new bath pillow and read most of that New Yorker story on Paul Haggis’ resignation from Scientology; I don’t have an opinion one way or the other about Scientology because I can’t quite figure out why it’s any of my business, or how it varies that widely from almost every other religion except that it’s new, but I do have the opinion that this story in no way merits all that space in the New Yorker
- coming downstairs to drink one of those beers and work on my play, “I, Teratoma,” which is what I was doing just before…
- … writing this blog post.
Web of confusion, part three.
February 17th, 2011A week and a half ago, I proposed that the Spider-Man musical might have been better if they’d had an actual Spider-Man writer involved. Sounds like the producers have now gotten one of those involved — and, importantly, it’s one who is also a playwright.
The unanswered question is: What could be changed in the script that could make the show better? In my experience, every production gets its own culture — its own informing ethos — that is distinct from what’s in the script; Apple and IBM may both make computers, but they do them rather differently, and what we see is a reflection not just of the different plans on paper, but of the different company cultures. A theatrical production is mounted by a production company, and that company culture is difficult to change. Once you get too far into the rehearsal process, it’s difficult to change directions, and “Spider-Man: Turn off the Dark” is a show that, more or less, for better or worse, seems to have opened, and long ago. (It has also been widely reviewed, and savagely panned.) Add to that that this is supposedly the most technically demanding show in Broadway history; what significant changes can be made when you’ve already got that much physical hardware in place? And finally: With a show that is already legendary for the injuries incurred in some very dangerous stunts, how much will producers want to risk in changing how the rigging and pyrotechnics and whatnot work in relation to the script?
It’s a lot to overcome. I hope they can work it out.