Second post of the day: melancholy laced with cheer

Please put some Son House on for this post.

Me am melancholy because there's a woman I wanna see again but the time is not yet ripe. I'll spare you the details, but I've got to get myself properly situated before I'm ready to make a play. It's a pretty banal situation, but at least I'm planning for the future; I sense that I've been taking what came to hand too often lately, instead of going forth and finding opportunities on which to jump. Despite the onset of Autumn I'm in a Springish mood, a regenerative mood. I'm ready to get out of the all-too-comfy rut I've plowed for myself. I'm too comfortable; it's the comfort of lazy resignation. Time to shake things up.

Cleanup

I was telling one of my Shakespeare at Sloss co-performers about my filthy-apartment woes and said "I've got four big trouble spots. If I can clear those up I'll be out of the woods." She said "you can probably clear up each spot in about a week, right?" I dunno, but her saying it motivated me to tackle some of those trouble spots that I've done nothing more than furrow my brow at for a while.

I've got a pile of clothing that I haven't worn in years; for various reasons I decided these clothes didn't fit the bill, and I threw them in one of the semi-closets that pepper my apartment. Today I finally started sorting through them... they'll need serious cleaning, but most of them will be wearable with a bit of care, and some of them are startlingly nice clothes that my parents bought me, years ago. I'm dumbfounded that I didn't appreciate these things, and just left them in a lump.

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Three comics from Picturebox (see link to left!) arrived yesterday: 1-800-MICE ishs 1 and 2, and Free Radicals. 1-800-MICE is by Matthew Thurber, whose contribution to acclaimed artcomix anthology Kramers Ergot 6 spellbound me. I'm savoring this new comic; it's like a mashup of the perfect long-form improv show, the perfect dream, and the perfect Saturday morning cartoon that never was (including the cereal ads).

Free Radicals is an anthology which blends new-school artcomix with prisoner art. New-school artcomix kids thought it would be interesting to solicit art from convicts, and they aren't wrong. So you get short narratives, some elegant and enigmatic images, and then, y'know, nekkid ladies with devil horns. The book is wildly uneven, but at ten bucks the best of it redeems the worst.

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I recently saw the movie Elephant by Gus Van Sant; it's based on the Columbine shootings. It takes Steadicam about as far as it can go, and builds up compassion for the victims without yanking at our heartstrings. One thing that struck me about it was that Van Sant presents the fictionalized shooters as affectless, bland, without overt passion. I had imagined the Columbine shooters acting out of an overflow of poorly-channelled passion.

I wonder what the Columbine shooters would think if they could see their fictionalized selves kissing in the shower.

Getting my look together

On the Saturday final rehearsal for Shakespeare at Sloss I wore contacts. The director told me she preferred my big clunky glasses, as they made me look more Horatio-ish or something. I got contacts so I could do theatre without either wearing glasses or being blind, but ever since I did my directors have all wanted me to wear the glasses. Directors love my glasses because these coke-bottle specs are so ridiculous that they make me look like a "character."

One of the ushers for our show (who has a Betty Boop voice, and with whom I instantly fell in love) met me in my contacts; after the actual show she told me "You look really nerdy."

"Well thank you" I replied.

I guess she thought they were costume specs, but no, they're part of my normal look. Finally someone was impolitic enough to blow the whistle on my dorky appearance; I hadn't quite fathomed the effect my glasses have on how I come across. It turns out she has a thing about nerdy glasses, though, and she likes to wear clear-lensed frames as part of her nerd-girl look. Hmmm.

Post-Sloss

The show went nicely! Doing the same scene three times in a row is a new experience for me; I guess I can go work at a theme park now. Hamlet and I really felt a connection this time; I have trouble connecting with people; I'm always abashed about looking people in the eyes. Connecting with Hamlet in the scene got me on a roll, and I managed to connect with several folks later that evening.


More later... I'm a bit behind at work.

Spare change?

This account of a statement by authors Michael Moorcock and Alan Moore dovetails with some of my recent thoughts:

Moorcock was fascinating on this subject, and I'd like to hear him talk more about it - he was essentially riffing on Shelley's line about poets being the unacknowledged legislators of humanity, talking about how "we can't get real change, and the only way to get actual change is to change the rhetoric", as well as talking about how other people had often come up to him and described remembering events from his fiction.

Moore's thoughts were broadly similar, but subtly different. While Moorcock spoke about the need to change rhetoric as a stepping-stone to real change, Moore says "we are living in text - we live by manipulating language".

I think reframing the nature of things is one of our only effective means of dealing with life. So much of life hinges on how we conceptualize it. And on some level we all understand this. So much of the way we talk about events reflects our knowledge that we have to understand events in useful ways. "Everything happens for a reason." But sometimes we have to supply the reason, or try.

Like Us

Today the Workplace lunch bunch (which is to say, my coworkers who eat hot stinky nasty food at their desks) are really in top form. The smell of what appears to be dog fried in mayonnaise has been assaulting my nostrils for two hours. I am a peaceloving person, so I shall seek the inner strength to live through this. Which is not to say that the fantasy of microwaving a bowel movement and just letting it sit on my desktop hasn't crossed my mind.

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Last night I watched a good portion of the DVD The 70s Dimension courtesy of Netflix. You gotta see this. 70s era commercials, public service announcements, and remixes of the same by such artists asPeople Like Us. The ads are more basic versions of the same cheap emotional pornography that is the stock in trade of advertising today. These back pages of media history are kind of like seeing your relatives in their underwear. I wonder what happened to the endearing muscleman who pitches cheap exercise gear? I'm serously considering learning the "When you're out of Schlitz, you're out of beer" announcer's spiel as an audition piece.

Little Shakespeare Video

Click here for a clip of the TV coverage. Click the teensy other video link in the corner to see the clip with me in it. Please note that they cut me out of the frame during the "I knew him, Horatio" bit which was the whole reason for my standing there. At least at Thanksgiving I get to tell my relatives that I was on TV. Being on TV is wonderfully impressive to my extended family. Although we don't subscribe to Noel Coward's rule that television is something one appears on, not something one watches.

BTW in actual performance I'm hoping not to be wearing enormous glasses (my contacts contact seems to be dragging her feet on stocking my contacts).

Also note that we cut the word "whoreson" out of the scene. Shakespeare is 2 HOTT 4 TV.