Happy Thoughts

Laree Love, Eric the Cinematographer, and Some Old Dude.

Laree Love again, clearly happier to be standing next to the lovely Laura Sweeney.

Okay, okay, here's something for all of you who are thinking "Wow, thanks for getting the blog going again, Captain Downer."

A very fun thing I could write about is "Satan Hates You", the movie we finished shooting just a bit ago. Problem is, everyone's got a stick up their ass about secrecy and control and How People Will Perceive Things.

I had wondered where Karl Rove had been working, now I know...

Anyhoo, this situation has made it damn near impossible to write about anything or post any photos. Luckily, one of the producers has posted some stuff on her blog, so it must be okay, and if it isn't, it's not my fault. Click Here!

Most of the photos are from the Wrap Party. I had a softball game that night, and as such arrived late. How hilarious to be the one sober person in a sea of your absolutely shitfaced friends. It was awesome. It also enabled me to steer a couple people out of certain trouble, which they've done for me many times.
Enjoy.

Awww Geez...

Dammitall, now I'm pissed again. This time it is for a far more pedestrian reason. Have you seen this article? One of those "And...um...why is this in the paper of record?" mail-it-in, lazy ass, New York Times summer break puff pieces, it delves into the phenomenon of public drinking in New York City.

Fine. They can't all be peaches, as Laree Love likes to say.

Except it does not describe Public Drinking in New York City. It describes Public Drinking in the New York City of the Writers of the New York Times. You may have seen this New York on your map. It shares a border with the New York City of Public Radio. There is an interesting photo from this area at the top of the article, showing Young Educateds waving bottles of white wine around Bryant Park, in front of the New York Public Library, prepping for a free viewing of "Breakfast at Tiffany's" or "Jules and Jim". Charming.

Later, we are transported by the article to the soul-scrapingly hip neighborhood of Williamsburg for a lesson in what the freshly minted (and muddled?) writing class are drinking while they take in their craft sales and noise bands at McCarren Pool. Here, white wine is for those stuffy Brown grads in Bryant park. We went to Bard...Pabst Blue Ribbon, bitch!

And you know, I have no problem with any of that. True, my keyboard seems to sift all my thoughts through some sort of USB-enabled class warfare filter I don't remember installing, but hey, as a veteran public drinker, even the stratospheric levels of hypocrisy I allow myself would not allow the denigration of public consumption on this blog.

My problem is with the-here comes the filter-huge class issue this reporter was too chablised to see staring them in the face. The one thing all the gatherings in the article have in common.?

White people. Seas of white people. Not exclusively, no. But seriously, come on...90% white.

So what? Well let me tell you a story...

Two years ago I had to go to court. Penny Ante Court. The kind where you sit with a hundred other people and they call out your Class "Are-You-Kidding-Me?" misdemeanors, you walk up front and they give you your $25 fine. This was unpleasant. It did, however, have its moments, most of which were the Public Drinking tickets, which were read out loud, just like every other ticket. The kicker is the drink in question is an official part of the complaint and must also be read aloud:

"Number 34602, Public Consumption: Miller Lite."
"Number 58875, Public Consumption: King Cobra."
"Number 14453, Public Consumption: Budweiser."

And so it went. I learned a few things that day-and the three other days it took, over 4 months, to get a dismissal-as one will in any place they are thrown in with a large group of people they didn't self-select somehow. I learned that Hispanic men who drink on the street, selected for indiscretion, prefer Coors Lite. I learned that police actually do pull over a lot of gypsy cabs for picking people up at bus stops. I learned yet again that it is expensive to be poor, as time and again the judge heard stories from people who missed a half day of work to be there in court to request another extension regarding the payment of $50, $75, $100 fines.

I also learned that one never, ever hears:

"Number 67643, Public Consumption: Iron Horse Vineyards 2005 Rued Clone Chardonnay"

I'm just sayin....

Bummer

So, I was all set to end my summer blogging vacation with a little ditty about the Baseball All Star Game and how it may show the first step has been taken toward a new, better era in baseball. There are an incredible number of first-timers playing, which I was going to connect to another trend-that of the younger teams doing surprisingly well this season-and surmise that the testing for steroids and-some say more importantly-amphetamines may be showing results with, surprise, surprise, a world where 27 year-old athletes perform better than 38 year-olds.

But then this came across my google home page and ruined everything:


It brings up a couple questions:
-Is bringing someone to this point really effective? Apparently the interrogators who pack up and leave don't think so. I don't know jack squat about interrogation-outside of an assistant principal's office, where I am a decorated veteran-but this stuff has been denounced as foolish and ineffective by those very few with actual wartime experience.

and secondly...

-Is this really who we want to be?

4 A.M.? Are You Kidding?

Apparently not, as I found out after rising well before dawn and doing something unprecedented: walking into a bar at 4 a.m., sober as a judge. We will be taking over Coco66 for the next few days, during the day, to shoot the bar scenes of "Satan Hates You." Shooting ended at 9:45 p.m. the night before, so the shift in working hours was extreme and punishing and had a few not-so-surprising side effects.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I present some of the cast and crew of "Satan Hates You" as I found them today, at lunch or between takes....

Our lead, Christine Spencer.



Actor Turquoise Taylor Grant.



Sound Man David Groman.



Actor Christina Campanella.



Grip and B Camera Operator Brandon Taylor.



Actor Jennifer Boutell.

Wardrobe Supervisor Tiffany Jordan.

Sweet dreams to them and the rest of the cast and crew as their heads hit their respective pillows tonight around 7 or 8 pm...except of course for the youngest whippersnappers, who I heard discussing power naps and nightlife plans. They make me remember my own youth, but not necessarily repeat it. Too tiring...

Hang Out at a Bar All Day

As I mentioned earlier, we will be filming a bar scene in Brooklyn on Friday at noon, and if anyone is interested in hanging around drinking free beer all afternoon, you can get more details at monsterpants.net or shoot an email over to satancast@yahoo.com. I can promise it will be skull-scrapingly boring, just like big Hollywood productions, but with crappier snacks.

In all seriousness, the vibe is very good and the crew is young, eager and efficient. It has been interesting to see how three different versions of horrifically non-politically correct smartassery blend with each other.

There is the version of James, myself and Laree Love, the oldsters, which runs to sixth grade poo poo humor and the occasional "I'm just going to say the most offensive thing possible right now."

There is the one-raised eyebrow hotshot cracking wise of the young crew, letting you know they could do this job with one hand and a blindfold and that yes, young ladies on the set, they are indeed very available...

Add to these the world-weary classic camp snark of the costume and hair/makeup departments, anchored effectively by our 6'2" dragalicious makeup maven Alan Rowe Kelly and you've got a roiling cauldron of Offensive, strong enough to send the most jaded Human Resources Director screaming towards the legal department. It does however, provide all the nutrients essential to high morale during long days, late nights and absurdly early mornings.

Back...Again

Well it was bound to happen. Just when I've been telling friends that McKenney seems much more relaxed on this shoot, he goes and throws his back out...

One way or another I will smuggle out some pics of The Man With the Plan doubled over with a heating pad strapped to his back, trying to direct.

Because they are hilarious.

I had to basically undermine the bastard's authority and shame him into sending a Production Assistant out to get something, anything for his back. I knew just what to get, as I had almost lost the use of my own back during the race to build the set for "Satan Hates You" and keep pace with my actual construction job. It was a week of getting up at 5am to go to the set and get a few hours of work in before my 9-5er, then back to build the set until 11pm or so. The last few days it took quite a while to get my clothes on and my shoes tied. Desperate to be able to keep working, I grabbed something I knew would probably not work, one of these air activated heat wraps from Walgreens. It is basically a meshy belt that velcros around your lower back and holds two of those flat hand warmer packs you usually see in the hunting section of Walmart.
Absolutely amazing. Eight hours of actually being able to bend and twist, two motions I've come to appreciate quite a bit. And while it wasn't exactly what the PA brought back (he got the large one you strap on and microwave) and while it didn't do everything for him it did for me, it did allow Jim to get through Friday's shoot, the last at the hotel location.

Saturday was a day off from shooting, but he had to make an appearance at the Fangoria convention. Me? I spent my day cleaning the apartment I have trashed over the last ten days of builidng/shooting/running around and trying to get this tremendous knot out of my neck, the final remnant of my back situation. This afternoon we shoot a party scene. If you're in the neighborhood, drop by.

Cool Briefs

What I meant to say is a Brief posting about some Cool things I saw, but "Brief Cool" just is not a good headline. A good title for a French language police thriller, perhaps.

Anywho...

Time is short as we are shooting James McKenney's new movie, "Satan Hates You" over the next two weeks in Brooklyn and Queens, but after three days of shooting I wanted to take a moment and relay two cool things I saw last night.

First, I worked with Michael Berryman, horror icon, last night and watched as yet another star of a million kid's nightmares gave an hilarious comic performance. Between takes he turned to Ruth Kulerman, the actress he was working with, and started singing! Angus Scrimm, the infamous Tall Man of the Phantasm movies did the same thing when we have worked with him. I turned to Jim and asked "So of the five or six Most Terrifying Men in Film, I've met two now....do any of them not sing?"
Having never been a horror movie fan (they actually scare me...no seriously...not in a fun way), I didn't have any preconceptions of these actors but I have to admit I wouldn't have expected them to be some of the sweetest people one could ever meet. Both are serious animal lovers. During the inevitable "My pic with Michael Berryman" receiving line after his day of shooting was over, he patiently stood for pictures with every member of the cast and crew, which though tiny, still took quite a while, his only request that each person just go and visit the website for the wolf sanctuary he's involved in. (I left the addy at the set, will edit it in today!)
Berryman has a great comic sense on camera and is an energetic raconteur during breaks. If I write here that he dropped some words of film wisdom Milos Foreman told him, I'm sure it reads very Dennis Miller Los Angeles Skeezeball Grotesque, but in the context of a discussion with Jim about what we actors should be worrying about and not worrying about in the scene, it was just shop talk.
Intimidating shop talk, but shop talk nonetheless.

The second and in the end cooler thing I saw was our sound man, David, explaining his equipment, piece by piece during breaks to our 18 year-old, I-just-want-to-learn-everything-about-film intern and letting him boom a couple shots at the end of the day. Like carpentry, the tradecrafts involved in making movies benefit greatly from book knowledge, but cannot be learned from books. Somebody has to decide to show you how to do it, then stand there and make sure you don't f- it up. If you are lucky, they don't just show you how to operate each tool and complete each task, but how to approach The Job and Work in general; how to be a Professional, and just how small a percentage simply operating tools and completing tasks has to do with earning that title.
Every once in a while things devolve into sentimentality around here, I know, I know...
But every once in a while things slow down enough for my eyes to actually see, and when that happens I usually see something pretty decent. Last night, sitting alone on a staircase with a faceful of makeup and a fistfull of beer, watching the last shot of a long day, I saw a very young kid learning The Job from a young pro as they recorded the between-takes ballads of an "old" pro still full of surprises in the twilight of his career.
It gave me a grin so big it should be easy to find and pull out next time this cantankerous old brain turns on me again...

Mr. McKenney is being as secretive as always, but as soon as I clear photos for public consumption, I'll post 'em.

(By the way...being late=not pro, which I am about to be...I thought this was supposed to be a short post...?)

Heh...funny story...

So, look at this beauty...


That there is a staircase we built the other day. An old fashioned, notch-the-damn-treads-into-the-stringers staircase, good for probably a million plus trips and/or the occasional death by falling/murder. And if that wasn't enough, we built an even longer one!


There's the boys workin' on it, right there! You can see the notches already routed into the stringer. There are treads and riseers stacked to the right. They get slid in with glue and then wedged into place with...uh...wedges, and shims, which are also glued into place. Like so:



That is the back side. See the wedges and shims and how they are all glued in? When you've got the whole system glued together with a quality glue, in this case Titebond III, it's damn near indestructible!

While they assembled the big guy, I whipped up this little number to support the last stair tread, which will curve around the newel post and back into the carriage, sort of Poor Folks Grand.



All in all, a great day of carpentry ending with delivery on Friday.

Only one thing could have made it better.

The staircase could have been the right size.


Seems there was a little miscommunication regarding the length of each step. Just one itty-bitty inch, but wouldn't ya know it, those little inches add up. Each step longer, the rise (vertical measurement) remaining the same, the angle of decline ends up shallower and all of a sudden the 6 feet 8 inches required by the building code between each step and the landing or ceiling above kind of....disappears.
One good thing about a problem like that; you don't have to stand around scratching your head for an hour trying to think up what to do. The staircase must get lowered or the second floor must be raised. Simple.

Did I mention the staircase was well-built?

Goodbye weekend, hello high-pitched whine of machinery.

We delivered the new staircases at 10:30 this morning.

Good times.

Another Robot Attack?

Yes, that is correct, humanity must sally forth and fight in defense of the earth's biomass.

Ironic, eh?

It has become clear that I did not announce/plug/whore the DVD release of "Automatons".



Well consider yourself endirtied (yes, endirtied) with the filth of self promotion. I've added it to the little amazon bar down there to the right so you can pick it up any time. And just in time, I might add. I am meeting the auteur, Monsieur McKenney, this afternoon. He has descended on our little hamlet from his Fortress of Tiny Dogs upstate to attend the New York Comicon and, ostensibly, promote the DVD. Of course, what he is really doing is adding to his Full Room of collectibles. A full room. Large. With shelves.

In any case, it would be awkward to see him, knowing I had forgotten to plug the damn movie. So now it's done. For those of you who don't know what I'm talking about, you can read about the process here, and then here. You'll need to scroll to the bottom and work your way up the posts, as I was lazy about layout when I had to do it myself.

It is by far the most well reviewed movie we've done, which has led to it playing in festivals all over the world. (This weekend, London.) The response on Netflix has been less positive, to say the least. Of course, the average renter always hates what we've put out there, and I think I've had an epiphany about this.

I've been a part of projects that had major problems and were disliked by critics and the Rating Public. I completely understand that, but I've been mystified by how a project I've done can get great reviews and just awful User Ratings. I think I realize now that the Rating Divide on these low-tier distribution movies is based on expectation. The one or two Raters who did like the movie compared it with movies like Eraserhead. They had a frame of reference to place the movie in, and judged it on those merits. This is how a movie like "White Chicks" ends up with a netflix rating 100% better than ours. I'm not going to say Automatons is a great movie, but I am going to say that I watched most of "White Chicks", just to prove how tough I was, and that movie never even tried to be good. It plain stinks on ice, but, people were able to see commercials for it, saw the preview at movie theaters and knew what they were in for if they went to see it. So they didn't.

What they did do was rent it. And when they rented it they knew what they were in for. They had a frame of reference to view it within. With a movie like "Automatons", at the bottom of the distribution company's priorities, all you get is the box art on a website and a blurb. You see it as a new sci-fi release, look at a 100 x 150 pixel rendering of the box and put it in your queue. Eventually it arrives, in the same exact envelope and disc cover "Transformers" and "Rashoman" came in. You pop it in and...you are gobsmacked. What the hell is this? Is it some sort of joke? F this! And you storm over to your computer to try and save others from this awful fate. Had you seen previews, had you seen ads, you would have been expecting the style and either decided not to watch it or watched it and let it succeed or fail based on what it was trying to do.

I realize this may sound defensive, now that I think about it, but I've been honestly puzzled about this until I started putting this blog post together, tracking down the links for the movie site, with it's lists of great reviews, and the movie on Netflix, with its 1.7 rating,and it all came together. It's also a lot easier to look at this one objectively, as my performance takes place inside a robot suit, which does great things for an actor's anxiety.

That my previous performances seem delivered from inside some sort of stiff exoskeleton, that I've got no answer for...

It was a beast to make, in a small warehouse in the dog days of summer with no AC, but watching the "making of" footage, I was brought right back to just how goddamn fun it is to make things with people you enjoy. Kind of why I'm still swinging a hammer, I guess...

Oh...that, and I have no other skills....

My *Sister* Blogs Better Than You!

At least she would if she did. She certainly leads a more interesting life than mine. Check out this little doozy from my inbox today:

"Cohen VS Fence Post! Round 2!!!:
It was only two short years ago that Cohen ended up in the ER due to his fight against the ruthless Fence Post. Yesterday the Fence Post came back to get revenge on Cohen. You can still see the original scar under Cohen's right eye from the attack. If you think Cohen looks bad................you should see the Fence Post!!!"

Cohen and my sister; possibly pound-for-pound the toughest two people I've ever met.

To Serve Man

Okay, its been a while. I realize that. But things have finally finished up at the commercial job we were doing, which means I am unemployed for the next, uh, day. Which is about as good as it gets. Being unemployed for about ten weeks was scary (though strangely ineffective at lowering my tax bill). Being unemployed for...oh...Wednesday, that's a chance to catch up, do some business hour errands, etc.
Let's start with a few photos from these recent jobs:

Here is an example of job site ingenuity.

I apologize for the low quality of the photo, but it is a shot from my ancient phone in low light. If you can make it out, this is a latch on the inside of a makeshift bathroom at a job on the Upper East Side. In this photo the door is on the left, the wall on the right, the latch contraption affixed to the door with the latch thrown.

To have a toilet is a luxury during the early days of a job, much less a door. The fact this one has an intricate latch on top of all that is a testament to an ingenious mind with a hatred of the simple framing they should have been doing with all the time they poured into this. The bolt of the latch slides left to right and is held in place by those two vertical pieces on the right. The third vertical-on the left-is a handle/stop and if you look closely you can see shiny metal screw which also acts as a handle/stop. This is probably not as interesting to those of you unfamiliar with general job site conditions.

But I think most people can recognize the other side of the coin, here:


What you are looking at is a tool that, new, was versatile enough to be called a 5-In-One. Whether it is now a 1-In-One or a None-In-One is, I suppose, debatable. Some jobs, including the spreading of certain kinds of mastic, create tools so gunked up they would require gallons of solvent to clean them. This is why they make cheap, plastic spreaders. The tool above isn't remarkably expensive, but I can assure you the guy who did this didn't buy it, or it's replacement.

Seat belts on? Good, because we're about to take a hard, poorly transitioned turn....

I'm not big on news hype, and can only watch any news channel these days for so long before the overwhelming assault of graphics and constant yelling forces me from the room-(no really, close your eyes and listen next time, many of them are actually yelling...wearing microphones 10 inches away from their mouths in a studio and yelling...)-but this stuff caught my eye:





Ummm, I don't want to alarm anyone, but I've watched a lot of science fiction in my day, and I've seen these reports about fifty times over the years. This almost never ends well.
Especially now, without Charlton Heston around to save us from ourselves.
I implore you not fall for miraculous new foodstuffs or the promises of benevolent alien overlords.

I'm just sayin'...





On a lighter sci-fi note, I stumbled on this website this morning: dinosaursandrobots.com.

Cool stuff, speaking of which, "Automatons" is playing in London this weekend if you're in the neighborhood.

One More White Guy on Dr. King's Assasination

Dr. King gave this speech the night before he died.





Work today was an usually quiet, solo affair for the most part, installing aluminum trim pieces on the glass partition wall we installed yesterday and caulking the edges. One of those days where I get a lot of podcast and radio listening done. Much of the focus today was on the anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King's assassination, and it reminded me of my visit to the site of his murder, which is now the National Civil Rights Museum. I wrote a little about it but spoke at greater length about my experience there in doncast14. I've clipped the relevant portion as todays podcast.

You can get the whole text intro and everything here:
"Hope. Not so expensive..." July 1, 2006

It was strange to listen to it now. I never thought of these as little time capsules, but of course they are.

Journey to the Voids

Howdy everybody and Happy Easter to anyone who celebrates it. I had wanted to answer Jenny's question about voids in plywood a couple days ago but couldn't find the time. Luckily, I had to cut a notch in the end of a piece of plywood the other day, which gave me the perfect opportunity to take a photograph of what I'm talking about.

Over on the right you can see the back of a piece of plywood. This is a piece of A-C plywood. The A and C refer to the quality of the surface of the plywood. One side of this plywood-the A grade side-comes sanded and with all voids filled, ready to paint. The back is C grade, which is a lower grade. You can see the voids and unfilled cracks in the photo. It is also not sanded on this side. (More plywood grading info here.)

To the right you can see where I've begun to chip away, exposing the different layers or plys that give the sheet it's name. Each ply has the grain running perpendicular to the layers above and below it. This is what gives plywood it's uniform strength. Usually, these layers are harvested by shaving a layer off the tree as it is spun on it's long axis. You can see evidence of this process when you look at the face of a sheet of plywood and see the same grain pattern repeating itself over and over. Every time the shaved layer hits a knot, that hard, center portion of the knot can fall out, leaving a hole-or void-in that layer. Depending on where the plywood sheet is cut, the finished edge of the plywood might contain part of that void. This means one would have to fill and sand it before painting, and would pretty much disqualify it for clear coating.


In other news, the "Grand Theft Autoclave" team tied for second place in the Pete's Candy Store weekly trivia challenge, which was good for a $17 bar tab ("PBR's for everyone!") and qualification for the SuperBowl of Trivia, some months away. Trivia Tip: I have found that if you are willing and able to quickly and legibly fill out the answer sheet, nobody brings up your lack of good answers.

As another side note, I finally got around to watching Obama's speech on race and was glad I did. I find myself stunned when any of the three candidates speaks publicly. Each of them reminds me that it was once okay to have coherent, complicated ideas as a politician and to be able to express them. Obama, though, clearly takes it to the next level. I also agree with him, which helps...
I never thought I'd support someone who did not specifically utter the words Universal Health Care, but after some of the quotes that came out of the executive this week, I'm just getting all fluttery for someone who stands up and starts speaking and actually does not make my blood actually boil.

(If you don't have a lot of time, I think the best stuff starts about 15 minutes in.)

Return of the Tool Tips

So I am trying the "Blog This" button in Picassa, not, I am convinced, to good effect. It is always hard to figure out how stuff is going to show up in Blogger, but the rewards of having everything taken care of seem worth the penalty in layout freedom. The photo to the left (I hope) is of my knee, modeling the tip of his post. I have been through loads of knee pads in my time (peanut gallery, you may begin.........now), and have hated them all after a while. If they are not cutting off your circulation, they are falling off. I recently rolled my eyes and bought these "Better than anything you've tried!" numbers, and can say that yes, they are actually better than anything I've tried in the past.

They have a wide neoprene strap on the bottom and only the bottom. This allows a lot more knee movement without the tourniquet effect. Ridges along the sides on the inside keep things from falling in and keep the pads from flopping around. The face of the pad is tough, but not rigid, which is good for situations where you might kneel on a screw and want it to depress into the pad a bit rather than scratch an expensive but soft bamboo floor (don't get me started....).

I still keep an older pair of kneepads with a hard, solid face for special demolition occasions where I might kneel on a screw or nail or pungie stick that would pierce this pair, but I'm a convert. You can find them here.

We've been working at a big advertising agency, building a photo retouching room. One of these jobs where we build a big glass wall and then install really expensive automated blackout shutters so no light comes through the...uh...big glass wall? Mine is not to question why...

Here is Michael clearly sleeping on the job when he is supposed to be trimming the post which will form part of the wall. We had to fabricate it in two parts to get it in the elevator.

And here is a section view of the trimmed post. It's made out of Multi-ply, which is plywood without any voids. Much heavier and more expensive, but consistently strong. Also, because it has no voids, every cut edge has a nice, solid, striped look, which allows you to just sand it, clear coat it and leave it. The cut edges of regular plywood look awful and require edge banding. I think this always looks better.

A Questions of Brains and Brainpower

With Audio.

I take a self congratulatory moment at the beginning of this one to say "I told you so" regarding the "Bodies" exhibits. It would make more sense if you knew the "so" that "I told you."
This is what I wrote June 2nd, 2005:

Someone in the forums brought up the German guy who plasticizes corpses people thought they were leaving to
science and flays them, basically, posing the eviscerations in "imaginative" or ironic situations. A man carries his
own skin on a hangar, stuff like that. It is touring science museums as an educational "visible man" , "visible
woman" event.
I don't have a problem with people seeing the inside of the body of a dead person. I think it entirely appropriate
to open medical school dissections to the public or to perform dissections in museum auditoriums for people to
see. I know seeing the traveling school exhibit of real human lungs, one healthy at death, the other ravaged by
smoking allowed me to visualize what I was doing to myself and helped me quit smoking.
But these bodies are posed for effect. He is using human corpses as a material, a medium like wire or clay. He
himself calls it "edutainment." Have we reached a point where it is okay to entertain ourselves with the bodies of
the dead?
And where did he get these bodies? I'm sure there are people now who have signed up to have this done to
themselves, but who were the first batch? A visitor to the show remarked that most of the "cadavers" (what are they
to be properly called now...is there an honestly descriptive name we can live with as a society?) were clearly
Asian. Well good, at least they're not from an area under international pressure to clamp down on illegal and
coercive organ harvesting. The copy of the expository material the museums put up on their companion websites
tap dances around the fact the original owners of these bodies had no idea they would be turned to plastic,
posed doing skateboard tricks (yep) or riding a bike and packed around the world for profit as part of a macabre
sideshow. For thats what this is. Let's just admit it. The cash starved institutions who book this show can polish
this turd with the "Learning Anatomy" cheesecloth all they want but there is far more Barnum than Herophilus in
this guy. In one article I read he tells the reporter to write it up as sensationally as he would like, as more people
would come the more outraged the press.


F**k this guy.

And this is a link to the story they did on 20/20.
(Brian Ross, by the way, is one of the only investigative guys left that doesn't make my skin crawl. He seems to realize just maybe the story is more interesting than he is.)

If you want to see the Ted Conference talk by Jill Bolte Taylor that I reference, it is here.
There is more about James Burke here. His fantastic show "Connections" can be found on Netflix and the interview with him that I heard can be found here.

The music is by Jonathan Coulton.

I Heart Cops!

Just a quick one, a positive start to the week...

I just want to do my part to promote the youtube video below. It shows a Los Angeles Police Officer (apparently his name is Sergeant Wayne Guillary)at a protest against the Church of Scientology. There is the usual chanting crowds, etc. you'd expect with a "Police at Protest Video", but his response is one we don't usually see publicized. He is calm, informative and actually fulfilling his duty as a "peace" officer. I imagine 99% of cops in the same situation do the same thing, but never get seen. Here's hoping this guy is turned into an internet sensation and ends up touring the country (or at least New York City) doing crowd control seminars for other cops.
Link away, ratchet up the positive reinforcement pressure, and if you'd like, send an email to: contact@lapdonline.org



EDIT: I just watched it again to check the post went up okay, and realized something else, the actual true power of his approach. At the end of his sentence about not wanting them to get hurt, the off screen voice of a protester says "Okay, yeah."
What else could he say?
Genius.

"You know nothing of The Dance!"

If you didn't yell out the title of this post with your nose in the air and one hand upraised in haughty ire, you didn't do it right. Try it again, louder and faster. Feels good, doesn't it? I can't remember where I first heard it, but I'm ashamed to say it applies to me. Years of building sets for theatres put me in contact with the odd summer dance series, and I've even bought tickets to a Pina Bausch piece now and then, but in the main it is a language impenetrable to me. So when I got a call for a job involving an experimental dance company, I walked into our first meeting with the same mindset I'd bring to a discussion about a bathroom renovation or a new deck.

Within minutes, of course, I was in love with these crazy kids and their ambitious, outrageously underfunded idea of mounting a mixed media dance performance at two locations simultaneously, one a funeral home, one a local park, the audience shuttled between by rickshaw.

Rickshaw.

After the "kids" remark I should probably point out at least one or two of the company are at least as old as I am, but when you hear of a plan like that, proposed in the wettest month of a cold winter, who could help but get all "aww, shucks....those crazy kids and their fists full 'a giddyyup..."?

Their plan involved building a shed with three huge plexiglass windows, a floor and a ceiling platform for audio equipment, two stand alone benches of different heights, and at a distance, a sound muffling box for the generator used to power the audio and a few lights...

In one day.

Clearly, they knew those were odds I could not resist. The fact this "one day" needed to happen within the next few days, one being a holiday, all to be windswept and frigid, did indeed complicate matters, so I charged them...half my day rate. One could look at this as yet one folly more in the perpetual farce that is my history with business decisions, but I prefer to view it as a temporary romantic lapse. Business is business, true. And building things is how I pay for other things, like booze and health insurance. But building those things for rich people is-as they say in congress-what it is, and nothing more. Helping artists accomplish their folly...there is something more there, at least to me. Something worth something. At least for a day.

The slide show beneath contains two sets of pictures, one set from my camera on the-very long, very cold, very fun-day of the build and one set of production photographs sent to me by the dance company, bluemouth inc. I'm afraid they came without credit so I cannot pass that credit on. The show is called "Death by Water" (be sure and click on the poster) and is playing through Sunday, right down the street, including Fort Greene Park. I've seen it, and this philistine would recommend it to anyone in the neighborhood.






From Around the Web:
They apparently arrested Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout in Thailand yesterday. (If Thailand isn't careful, they are going to lose that "I can always just put a bunch of cash in a bag and lay low in Thailand" reputation: 1, 2, 3 ) I only mention this because the guy is quite a character and the story is amazing. Imagine a more African-centered "Syriana" but instead of an interlocking cast of characters, you meet the one guy who deals with all of them.

A very small number of you may have seen the uneven Nicolas Cage vehicle-redundant on a good day, I know, I know-"The Lord of War." This guy was the inspiration for the book that inspired the movie.
If you are sitting in front of your computer with some time to listen to the story told, check out this episode of NPR's "Fresh Air".

Gary Gygax: No Puns, Just the Death of a Giant

"So CNN says the guy who invented Dungeons and Dragons died."
"Gary Gygax died?"
"Umm...let me find it. Yeah. Geez. You knew that? You are a nerd."


Yes I am.

At least I was, or still am when it comes to certain things.

I did not play D&D as often or for as many years as a lot of my peers, but I did play it from early on...1977 or so (maybe one of you who knew me then can fill it in) and full-on, unabashedly loved it. It was a completely new experience. D&D was a "game" like a symphony orchestra is a "band." In complexity alone it was an exponential leap.

Basically, in 1974, here were the games available to you as an American:
(I'll leave out the games for small children, like Candyland)
Sorry
Checkers
Chinese Checkers
Chess
Life
Monopoly
Risk
Clue
Scrabble

I'm sure I will hear from you with a few others. But that's basically it.
We're talking about a game universe of around ten games, most over 20 years old. This was a decade before Boggle, for chrissakes. Lucky for us, in those days you were allowed to run around outside, and unlike the children of today, we were not too tired to do so for all our running between the tables at restaurants. Adorable.

It was not far into a boy's youth those games lost their luster, especially as they were expected to be played with members of one's family. Anyone who believes fierce competition is enjoyable in a family setting has never experienced either. Visits to the local hobby store for more glue and Metallic Silver model paint eventually led to an answer. Shelves of different, more serious games. "Strategy" games.

By 1977 I had played a few of these strategy games. The serious kind. Maps large enough to require hunting through the back of a closet for the kitchen table's extra leaf. The entirety of Europe layed out flat and chopped up, not into a simple grid, but a honeycomb of hexagons each about 1/2 an inch wide. Hundreds of tiny cardboard chits, painstakingly released from their perforated sheets, would soon cover the table. Infantry Squads, Half Track units, Supply Units, Air Resources. A near unit-by-unit recreation of the European Front. Games would last hours, stretching over a day or two, and usually end with one of us and our 11 year-old attention spans throwing in the towel. We were in above our heads. For crying out loud the Rulebooks to these games went on for 10, 15 pages...

D&D blew that out of the water.

Books. Plural. Here was not only a game. Here was a universe. It was a familiar universe to my friends and I, we had tore through the Tolkien books in 4rth and 5th grade. But here was a universe full of fantasy and adventure not waiting to be read but waiting to be explored! Waiting to be had, by a hearty group of adventurers and friends with a taste for battle and an unquenchable thirst for orange soda. I vividly remember how we knew we couldn't start playing until everyone knew the rules and how books were borrowed, or how spare books were studied on the couch as others played around a basement rec room coffee table. The mad rush to learn as much as possible as fast as possible, and then to get everything set up; the graph paper, the dice, the pencils, the notebooks...and then a sudden stop.

A pause. An unconscious moment of group silence just before...The Beginning of the Story.

And that is what I feel is at the core of the success Gary Gygax and his creation have achieved. (We are talking about big time success, by the way. I argued today that Gary Gygax saw his creation, the Role Playing Game, flower in a way unparalleled in the modern entertainment world. Walt Disney would be an obvious contender, but though the myriad Disney franchises are impossible to avoid in this country, you have to measure that against countries like South Korea, where 15 million people, or roughly 30% of their population are registered gamers, the vast majority of those role playing games. Add China into that mix, and you have vast swaths of the globe where role playing games are an obsession, including the US. Can Disney claim that sort of global footprint?)

At this point I'm sure many people who never played this game or one of its many offspring are wondering just why they should care at all. People who originated games or toys die all the time and nobody writes heartfelt eulogies for them. So the guy was successful, so what?

This is what I think...

I think the secret to the success of this new form is that it wasn't new at all. That tiny unconscious moment of silence shared by those around the table was the same exact moment shared by those around fires in caves and savannas tens of thousands of years ago. It is The Beginning of the Story. The genius of D&D was the leap from reading or even telling the story to playing the story. It created a framework for the spontaneous, simultaneous creation of a work of fiction by a group of people. It is this act of original creation that to me is the unique quality of the original pen and paper game, and probably why I've never found any of the many computerized role playing games all that interesting.

Around that table, it was you and your friends against rapacious bandits, insidiously clever traps, and of course, every goddamned nasty creature from every single goddamned mythos ever put to paper, stone or clay. There was a game master in charge, a sort of narrator/host/card dealer/referee, with the power to change the direction of the story at any moment, but your little group of adventurers had that same power, through the decisions you made. The presence of a human referee, unlike a computer program, means that solutions to the challenges you come across are not limited to what the computer has been programmed to respond to, but can be truly creative, or ridiculous, or sublime. The people around that table are creating, each time they sit down, a new original story. They are both playwright and audience.

People don't speak much anymore about Dungeons and Dragons making children devil worshipers, the apocalypse of young America they predicted never really panned out. But the topic was hot as brimstone back in my day. My parents, I believe, were genuinely worried. Then I had the friends I played with over for a game at our house and my parents realized they were all a lot smarter and well-behaved than I was. Three of them would finish in the top ten of our high school class. After that, I was encouraged to hang around them as much as possible.

Sadly, their manner was not contagious, but I do think I learned quite a bit from playing Mr. Gygax's invention with them. I learned about teamwork and negotiation. I learned that sometimes it was good to make a stand and sometimes it was just foolish, with quick and merciless consequences. (I forgot that soon after, it seems.) I was not a philosophical or religious kid, but determining the Alignment for the characters I made up had me thinking about righteous piety and powerful evil and the consequences of one's position on that continuum...

And I found out that guy who played the bass clarinet was a real tool.

Good lessons all.

Like most things I enjoyed in the past, that is where it belongs, but I'll always look fondly at that small compartment on my Nerd Utility Belt, even if I never open it again.

I thank you very much for those hours of escape at a time I desperately needed them, Mr. Gygax. God speed.



Edit: A late note...As I've gone about the nerdy side of my daily surfing, I've found the comments sections on many of the blog posts about Gygax's passing are running two or three times their usual lengths. A quick scan of these comments reveals many, many small details of playing this game back in the late 70's that I can completely identify with and which bring a smile. I thought I'd add some links to them here.
Rock, Paper, Shotgun
BBC News
the subliterate cinophile
Penny Arcade

One more before the holiday...

I just came across some weird aggregator that had a post up by me from about this time last year. It kind of goes on and on (I know, how surprising!) about being unable to kind of flip the switch on Holiday Spirit and what one might do about it. As I read it I realized I was in the exact same spot this year, only later, and that advice I gave to myself then would still be good advice for me today. Maybe someone else out there can use it too.
http://donwood.blogspot.com/2006/12/gift-of-nothing.html

Santa: Threat or Menace?

Let me start this post with a caveat: If you are under the age of 12, stop reading now.

Not that 12 year-olds read blogs, or that if they did, they'd read this one, but still...

A poster in the forums threw a question out for general feedback recently, one that comes up every year around this time: should she tell her 8 year old The Truth about Santa?

Now, I don't have children, so I'm treading a bit far afield here, but my sister has 7, and I've spent a week or two around them nearly every Christmas since Rugrat One. I'd like to think this gives me that sort of Anthropologist Living With the Tribes sort of perspective. You know...knowledge without true understanding, a sort of pompous empathy bordering on condescension...that sort of thing...

Anyhoo...

The question as old as the tradition itself: "When do I end the conceit that Santa Claus exists and brings these gifts?" well, you're on your own on that one. I've seen my sister struggle with it and there are so many factors... Do they have older/younger siblings? Are their friends finding out? Do they really want to know or are they really hoping to keep it going? It seems there is a real grey area where kids start to figure it out but somehow realize once they move beyond the Fat Man in the Suit they will be forever on the other side of that door, in a different and perhaps less comforting world. So that is a hard question, and I like to avoid those.

There is, however, a much easier question. It's a question I've really only begun to hear in the last decade or so. It is made up of two questions:
1. "Am I lying to my kid(s) when I tell them Santa exists?"
2."If I am lying, should I stop and be honest with them?"

Like I said, easy. The answers are 1.Yes and 2.No.

Slam dunk. Yes, you are lying to them. That is part of your job.

It may be that parents have been asking this for ages and I was just unaware, but I'm pretty sure I've seen this position grow from a tiny crackpot spore scrabbling about in the dark corners of the holiday to a fetid bloom of wet blanket Grinch Mold during my lifetime. Fertilized by the all-natural bovine waste of "My children are tiny adults", harvested by the Internet and distributed by Lazy, Google-Keyword-Driven, Lifestyle Reportage, it is now available for consumption nearly everywhere. It usually begins with the admonition that it is bad to lie to your children.

Really?

What is a lie besides the controlled manipulation of information, and isn't information control one of your duties as a parent? I often wonder if these parents sit down and watch the news with their 6 year-olds. Am I behind the times here? Children's books are a publishing gold mine, is there an entire genre that has been missed? An opportunity to be the J.K. Rowling of Children's Truth Fiction? How could I have been so blind?! Riches await!

"Let's Go Camping Forever!: A refugee tale."

"C is for Child Protective Services"

"Airway, Breathing, Circulation: The ABC's of Battlefield Trauma Stabilization for Kids."

"Where's Daddy?"

"The House with Police Tape for a Door"

"Jobby goes to China!"

"People Die."

and of course,

"Pets Die First."

Finally, books for kids who know everything their parents do!

I am aware, as some are sure to point out at this juncture, that keeping information from children is not the same as telling them something you know isn't true, but if the argument is about character, that is a bit of a fine point. (See "Dick Cheney" et al)

What I am saying, before I get too off topic here, is that if you tell me you have never lied to your children you are either lying to me, an adult, or you are an Ogre.

Yep. I'm not taking it back, either.

I imagine 99.9999% of those making that statement would fall into the first category. I consider my sister about the best parent I've ever seen and I've seen the White Lie in action as an invaluable, if little used, item in her tool kit. Without it, not only does it become necessary to fill kids in on adult situations we as adults wish we didn't know about-"Why is Uncle X leaving? Because Aunt Y is coming over and they're both in love with the same transvestite prostitute. Besides, he always leaves once the beer runs out. Remember? He's an alcoholic."-it also would create a world without surprise parties...without surprises of any kind.

Sure they will eventually find out, and when they do, they will also find out-if for some incredible reason they haven't already-that you know things they don't and do not always tell them those things. If they haven't learned by the age of 7 or 8 or whenever they start to ask about Santa that there are different rules for adults and children: A) you probably live in New York City and B) everyone hates your kids. Yep. Even the other parents who are "raising" their kids the same way. They talk to me. As their kids rampage between the tables of a restaurant we have attempted to eat at, they fill me in on how poorly behaved your kids are. And I lie to them. I lie by omission. I hold my tongue and let them carry on believing in the fantasy they've created, a fantasy in which their children are well mannered and a joy to be around and which could not be more fantastical if these selfsame children were to leap through a window, sprout wings from their backs and soar out toward the horizon, leaving sparkling rainbow contrails in their wake which, by God, by that point in the evening I'm wishing for harder than any kid ever wished for anything, Santa included.

Part of what I find repulsive about this whole No Santa thing is the idea that finding out Mommy and Daddy "lied" about Santa will rate somehow on a child's List of Disappointments, Disillusionments, Fears and Other Bad Things Associated With My Parents...that the rest of their child's life is clearly so perfect thanks to their progressive parenting that "The Santa is a Lie" entry will be the first item on that list. Listen, if that's the case, more power to 'ya and the kids going to be fine regardless of what you tell them, but most people I run into already had by that point in life a list long enough to ensure some therapist somewhere a nice little vacation, perhaps a small sailboat.

I don't remember the exact moment I found out Santa wasn't real. I do have a foggy memory of a discussion about Santa with some friends or cousins when I was about that age. I certainly do not remember seeing my parents as having lied to me in a horrible way once I found out. But I do, with crystal clarity, remember trying not to actually physically explode with excitement on Christmas Eve, wide awake in bed, all senses humming at absolute capacity, waiting for anything, the smallest sign of a Jolly Old Man with a small little belly that shook when he laughed like a bowl full of jelly.