| Just read this: |
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| 01:58pm 14/07/2009 |
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Coming to Dragon*Con this year... Terry Gilliam. Terry Brazil Munchausen Time Bandits Monty Python Crimson Permanent Assurance Twelve Monkies Fisher King Gilliam! Um... wow. This is the kind of awesome information that I just don't know what to do with. What do you do when you're given the chance to see a genius up close? One of the literally hardest working men in show business, who has fought hard and constantly, battling against studios, critics, budgets, weather and death to make some of the best, most inventive films I have ever seen and I might have the chance to see him in person and thank him for that. Damn, that's cool! |
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Read 5 - Post |
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| On Hagrid |
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| 04:06pm 13/07/2009 |
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There's going to be spoilers below if you haven't read the last two books.
I'm fretting a bit about going to see the new Harry Potter movie, because I was always a big fan of the character Hagrid, and one of his most powerful moments in the series is when the Death Eaters have infiltrated Hogwarts and Hagrid is rushing up the stairs shrugging off deadly curses and finding out that he was too late to help his advocate, mentor and friend, and being emotionally crushed by it. He practically becomes the embodyment of Harry's Id right there, and it was some of the best use of the character in the series before he devolved into a completely ineffectual drunken buffoon in the final book (seriously, she should have hardened him up or completely broken him down after what happened in book 7, but Rowling made Hagrid a goofy bumbler when she'd set him up for at least some development at the finish). That moment in that battle was my favorite moment in the books... and I've read two early reviews that say the battle isn't even in the movie. From what I've read, there's Death Eaters, but apparently they're not met with any resistance other than Harry chasing after Snape. |
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Read 3 - Post |
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| *bzzzzt* Sorry, wrong answer! |
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| 10:53pm 10/07/2009 |
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Apparently the answer to the question was: no! Don't go swing dancing. Well, I got that wrong. Had to help move a dozen heavy boxes from the office into storage after work, so I took a break for dinner, left too late for the lesson, and basically paid $10 to stand in the corner looking at everybody Lindy dancing. I asked one girl to dance, realized she didn't know East Coast at all, so fell back on just linking a bunch of turns, went to dip her at the end, she didn't know a dip and had the "I can't wait for this to be over" look on her face. I thanked her for the dance, started to feel very out of place, saw nobody I knew and left early. So again, for those playing along at home: the answer was "no, don't swing" that's "no, don't swing." |
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Read 5 - Post |
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| Swing or no swing tonight... |
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| 11:45am 10/07/2009 |
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I'm debating going to the Ga. Tech swing dance tonight. The lesson is Lindy, and I do still need to learn Lindy at some point, so it would be good for that, but I was also out last night until 1:30pm and apparently will be taking the van in with Dad tomorrow early for a routine check-up. Good exercise and learning new dance techniques that I've put off for too long, or getting a good night's sleep...
Decisions, decisions. |
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Read 1 - Post |
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| Had a blast at Rock Mafia's Wild Wing Alpharetta show |
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| 01:22am 10/07/2009 |
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Went to the Rock Mafia live-band Karaoke show and had a rockin', but somewhat bittersweet, time. It's definitely a bit of a hike getting out to Alpharetta and I got there far too early because I couldn't tell when the show was supposed to start, but I did have a damn good burger and explored a bit up Windward Pkwy until things were actually getting started (9:30ish). I figured "fuck it" and dove right in to the sign-up sheet and put my song in first slot, top of the list and first to sing: the Beatles "Come Together". I'm a big fan of when Joe Cocker covers the Beatles, so my "Come Together" had a bit of a Cocker feel, and the place really dug it (the guitarist asked if I was local, 'cause he wants me to come back and do some more stuff with them).
Good feeling, nice and different to have a solid, live band backing things up. The word display might take some getting used to, since it's just pages of lyrics projected on a screen, non-moving, that gets advanced a page when you get to the bottom, so if you're only fairly familiar with the song and kind of need the lyrics (like me most of the time) it's a little jarring, but hey, performance didn't suffer, so that's good. After that, I just hung out. I put in another song, but it was pretty clear that the only time anybody is ever singing twice at one of these shows is if the place is dead-empty which it definitely wasn't tonight. Some very good singers, and only two tone-deaf, frat-boys.
The down side of the evening was having an older, mustachioed guy who smelled like rotted acrylic paint for some reason (mostly his breath) decide that I looked familiar (his opening line at least) and he tried repeatedly to strike up a conversation that felt like he was either (a) high and loving everybody, or (b) gay and flirting with me. Probably (c) both of the above, but I tried to be polite and cool within reason, but at the same time the music was rock and so it was too loud to casually chat, which meant that any time he wanted to talk he had to get fairly close and then I'd get hit by that rotted acrylic paint smell. Eventually he kind of got the clue that talking wasn't really possible and that I was more interested in the show than making a new friend.
Other than that, though, great showI I had a blast, but then there's the bittersweet part: I looked through the song list and there's really only about six songs that I would sing on it and only four I'd be excited about singing, so I'd only be a regular there for maybe one and a half months before I ran out of music to keep me going there to sing. It's also loud enough to give you that muted Rock Concert hearing afterwards and pretty damn smokey, but I don't mind either of those things personally, I just know I have friends who might and who would be considering this a review or recommendation.
Verdict: fun, but limited.
...and the search goes on... |
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| Venturing out again into the Karaoke jungle |
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| 11:37am 09/07/2009 |
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Tonight I'm going to check out Rock Mafia's live band karaoke at the Wild WIng in Alpharetta. I hear good things about places like Metalsome, and my friend Lynn from Trilogy recommended the Rock Mafia show. My expectations at the moment are that it'll be cool to sing with a live band, but that I'll get to sing once. We'll see how it goes. If I dig it, I might try and check out the more ITP Metalsome shows. |
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Read 2 - Post |
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| Most offensive line in "Knowing" |
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| 02:15pm 08/07/2009 |
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Hey folks! I watched the movie "Knowing" a few nights back with the roomies, and it's pretty agressively badly written. Not worth seeing, but since I did see it, I want to note the most offensive line in the movie to me.
One Agnostic scientist presents to a Skeptic scientist his list of numbers that show a trend of representing locations, dates and casualty figures of major disasters and expresses that this list has predicted and will predict these events and gives verifyable examples to bear this out, saying that he is planning to use the list to basically attempt to avert the next listed disaster and the Skeptic scientist says: "Right now my scientific mind is telling me to have nothing more to do with this."
Bullshit! Bullshit, bullshit, BULLSHIT! I get it that the writer of this movie isn't a scientist or a skeptic and they were trying to make their film about a skeptic scientist faced with something that points to intelligent design, but when they put those words in the mouth of a scientist, what they're saying is "presented with testable, verifiable evidence of the existance of the supernatural, a scientist will be too afraid to pursue it scientifically or even acknowledge the verifiable evidence." That pisses me off so much! The whole point of the Skeptic movement is that there is no legitimate, verifiable, testable evidence for the existance of the supernatural, but that if there were we would verify, test and through the scientific method accept as proven theory the supernatural provided that evidence exists. A scientist or a Skeptic, provided with the information this one was given, might have said "you're scaring me and I don't want to have anything more to do with this." but they would not say "my SCIENTIFIC MIND is telling me to have nothing more to do with this." because their "SCIENTIFIC MIND" would be telling them that they HAVE to have something to do with this, to catalogue the data, see if the hypothesis posed by the other doctor is bearing out under testing, and to use that information to describe a theory that is repeatable with those elements! That's what a "SCIENTIFIC MIND" does!
Sure, there's plenty of other negative portrayal of an atheist in the Nicholas Cage character, who basically paints "determinism" as a beautiful theory countered by "chaos" which means there's no plan, everything's random and meaningless, and that's what he believes so he drinks a lot and is generally depressed. They also have him as a single father suggesting to his son (coping with the death of his mother) that "it's OK if you believe in heaven", basically saying that an Atheist still wants to believe when faced with death or sadness (kind of like that bullshit line "there are no Atheists in foxholes"). This parade of anti-atheist sentiment gets a nice cherry on top when Nick Cage's character calls his pastor father to alert him to the end of the world, and the pastor very calmly tells him how when it's his time, God will take him. The whole rest of the world is panicking in just about every shot, the sun is lashing the Earth with a whip of fire that is heating up steadily and ultimately sending burning collumns of fire down the street and the one Christian pastor is calm and blissful. Nope, that doesn't happen that way. Sorry. If he's an extremist enough Christian to see this as the endtimes and he's being called by God, he's going to at least show that in some way, otherwise he'd have at least some small sense of self-preservation and would at least show some twinge of worry, so to put that character in a movie where every other character is in either a state of panic or about to panic is even more of an insult to the intelligence of the audience. So yeah, the whole movie is a childish spit in the eye to rational Skeptics and scientists, and now that I've seen it, have deconstructed it critically, have taken in its message, measured it against the facts and found it doesn't bear out, my scientific mind is telling me to have nothing more to do with it. |
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Read 3 - Post |
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| Very early birthday plans |
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| 02:47pm 30/06/2009 |
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I'm thinking I'd like to plan to go up to the Bristol Renaissance Faire for the weekend of my birthday (August 7th-August 10th), so basically a three-night hotel stay with Friday and Monday as travel days (looks like a 12-hour drive) to comfortably get the full experience of a weekend at faire. I could cover the hotel and I've driven from Savannah to New York, so I know I could make it, but it'd be great to have some folks to spread the hotel cost and driving duties amongst, not to mention just share the fun company with. Right now it's just an idea, but I am very curious about that faire and would like to check it out. I think I remember hearing Amy saying great things about it, and I recently saw some of the images of the Fantastikals (we had a water fairy guest at GARF who is a part of their, apparently, sprawling troupe of etherial pantomime fairies), plus they have a few acts I'm very curious about. I know that's close enough to Dragon*Con that a lot of folks wouldn't want to spend the cash on a Ren Fest expedition, and that folks are saving up for Disney in September, but if this is interesting to you, let me know. |
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Read 14 - Post |
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| Last Airbender casting and Aydin Budala |
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| 03:30pm 24/06/2009 |
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I was introduced to Avatar: the Last Airbender by Sketch back when we were house-mates and pretty quickly fell in love with the character-rich storytelling, Subtly it crafted an interesting world based on ideas, governmental histories and religions of different Asian cultures with nods to China and Japan's Imperial ages, Inuit culture and Tibettan Budhist monks as some of the stronger influences. Taking that inspiration and building a world around it, I'd like to think, might inspire some interest in kids to learn more about world ideas and be more excited to learn about other cultures. When I was growing up, an animated series called Mysterious Cities of Gold, coupled with short travelogues at the end of each episode about the Spanish and South American cultures it was based upon, probably went a long way towards building that in me as a child and is the kind of show that I think is important for kids to be able to have access to so we can avoid jingoism and prejudicial nationalism.
Recently, a live-action film has been in the works under the direction of M. Night Shyamalan to translate Avatar: the Last Airbender from a brilliant animated serial into a three-film set of live-action motion pictures. The potential from the series for this to be something epic and beautiful if handled well is very great, but early on, when casting was announced, people saw that the main characters were all cast with white American actors, and there has been a great outcry, especially from Asian-American actors who are extremely underutilized and overly typecast in Hollywood and who feel like it's a real slap in the face for this film to be coming out, seemingly a huge opportunity for good Asian-American actors to shine in heroic ensemble parts where young Asian Americans could see themselves as represented in a movie they want to see, but those roles going entirely to white actors. Since the initial unveiling of the casting, some re-casting has been done to make the cast more ethnically diverse, but that does bring something up that is very interesting to me as an actor about what acting even is.
As an improv actor, I get the opportunity to play any character that I feel like playing in the scene, no matter what age, gender, or race, and can play them as seriously or over-the-top as I want, which is a lot of the joy of acting for me: exploring and playing characters very different from me as a regular person. Ren Fest gave me another opportunity to not only play a character very different from me, but to inhabit them, develop them and really get to live inside of them in a way that you can't really in short improv scenes. There are special challenges to that and taking challenges and running hard with them to meet them is something I like a lot and that keeps me inspired and interested. Holdyn Twyst was a great challenge to play since, although I am white, I'm not English at all, and as a pacifist who dislikes bullying and torture to be cast as a medieval jailer I had a lot of opportunities to look at the role and make an interesting individual character that I still enjoy getting into. This year, as you probably know if you're reading this, I went about developing an Ottoman ambassador. It wasn't an existing role that I was cast for, but one that a friend, Rivka, suggested and which seemed interesting and challenging enough to run with. Doing initial research, you find out that the people of the Ottoman Empire, especially in the seat of power in Turkey, were a wide range of skin tones, facial and body types as the Ottoman Empire was very much an active melting pot, so there was more than enough evidence to justify my character looking like I do, despite the current average look amongst Turkish citizens. Still, I'd be curious if there weren't some people who went to the Ren Fest and thought "why did they cast a white boy as an Ottoman? What, they couldn't find any Middle Eastern actors?" Still, I didn't hear that, and instead had several Middle Eastern families overjoyed at getting to see anybody at all representing a part of their history with respect and pride. That makes me doubly curious to see this "The Last Airbender" movie translation, because the actors are given an opportunity and a challenge to represent characters different from who they are and to build, develop and respect these different characters for who they are. I wonder how possible that is when they were cast for the roles based, presumably, on who they are and how they look instead of coming to the roles out of personal interest like I've been able to, but I hope that it is, because if it's only tollerated for actors to play parts close to how they already look and act in their regular lives, then where is the joy in being an actor? |
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Read 24 - Post |
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| ...small adendum to previous post |
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| 01:34pm 15/06/2009 |
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I would like to add that, despite all of the unexpected crap I encountered over the weekend, I am very proud of how the Mr. Friskett troupe handled themselves in less-than-ideal circumstances. I was worried at one point that I would have to entirely miss our first show on Saturday, but only worried because I wanted to see it happen. I had full faith in the troupe members to be able to modify and pull off the show without me, and when I did come in, I saw them doing just that. They were all very supportive and sweet to me throughout an otherwise hellish day, and I'm extremely happy to have them as friends and colleagues. |
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| Fuck! |
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| 11:39pm 27/05/2009 |
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I've been going to Trilogy every Wednesday since I found their Karaoke last November. I've been one of the first to arrive and one of the last to leave since then. Today when I came in, I was told unceremoniously that tonight was the last night they were going to have karaoke; that management had decided to take it off the schedule. I loved that karaoke. The setting, the feel, the mics, the singers, it all felt right to me. I shared it with friends, because it is the kind of place worth sharing, but even if nobody I knew ever came with me, I still would have gone there every week by myself. My nights have been hard lately as it is, and Karaoke at Trilogy was the only thing I had going on that was always consistantly there for me as a creative and emotional outlet without also being a responsibility, so I'm going to feel like shit all night thinking about losing that.
FUCK! FUCK! FUCK! FUCK! FUCK! |
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Read 6 - Post |
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