Sunday, March 19, 2006

2:25 PM - hurtling blindfolded through space

Bravo!

First, a big Bravo to Jamie Raskin for this exchange:



Second, a big Bravo to Terry Sendgraff and Cyclona for their beautiful messages of support. I got both messages between the Saturday afternoon and Saturday evening shows, and my evening show was a couple of notches more radiant as a result. Thanks to both of you, and thanks to Fenny for her support, and to Sharon, Rachel, Kelly, and Taury for showing up at the various shows to see me. You all are awesome, and I hope you enjoyed yourselves.

There were quite a few people shooting video of the dress rehearsal and performances. That footage is going to be edited into an official DVD for the performers. I have ordered a copy and should be able to post video of my piece in the next few weeks.

I hope everyone is doing well, especially those of you who are enjoying the sunshine in San Francisco.

Friday, March 17, 2006

7:22 AM - just like Harvey Dent

Two quick comments

First: I'm performing tonight and tomorrow. Wish me luck! Dress rehearsal went really well last night. I have this problem (and I'm certainly not unique in this respect; Wil Wheaton was writing about it in his blog just a couple days ago) where no matter how many congratulations and compliments I get, I still feel like I'm inadequate or not doing well enough or that I suck in a bad and obvious way and people are just being polite. So it was really nice last night at dress rehearsal when one of the teenagers who's performing in the show gave me a very sweet, genuine compliment. Now I just have to live up to it!

Second: Can we please not attack Iran? Last I heard, the United States does not have a "policy of pre-emption" even though someone would like to convince us that we have always been at war with Oceania. I think someone should mention to King Ding Dong that no one believes his propaganda any more: just look at his plummeting approval percentages. My personal policy of pre-emption: ITMFA. And I vote.

Tuesday, March 14, 2006

11:18 PM - cauterized for your protection

Whoa

Princess Kennedy showed up in Margaret Cho's blog. For those of you who haven't been reading the blog for 3 years, the Princess is a friend; she hosted my 2004 AIDS marathon fundraiser and was my stylist when I was in California. She's also part of a faboo drag queen band called Pepperspray. The video isn't tame or sanitized for your consumption, and I probably wouldn't suggest watching it at work.

I miss San Francisco.

Sunday, March 12, 2006

10:05 PM - I'd rather shovel dung.

the worst job ever

I just read this article: Seven Workers Fall From Roller Coaster

What I don't understand is this: why are they testing a roller coaster with human workers instead of with crash dummies or something? Obviously the corporation would rather have something happen to its employees than to a paying customer or to a valuable asset like a test dummy.

All seven workers survived and are in stable condition. The article does not mention whether they were wearing helmets. I certainly hope they were.

Friday, March 10, 2006

2:08 PM - Avast ye hearties! With a pickle.

My love is brined.

There's not a lot of news. I'm mostly rehearsing for my performance next week, so I'm spending a lot of time in the studio, blindfolded and swinging around at the hapless passers-by. Woe to you if you are a curtain in my path. I had a couple of creative stumbling blocks and panic moments, but with a nice mix CD from a friend and some time devoted to Terry Sendgraff improvising, I've been able to calm myself down and tweak things a bit so that I really like them.

I'm secretly hoping to get some good pictures and video from this performance. I only have one good picture of myself on a trapeze, and I'd love to have an actual gallery. Even if I'm blindfolded in the gallery.

Other mundane news includes the fact that formatting my hard drive has made it difficult for me to do work with designing Puzzle Pirate islands. Mac support for the editor has sorta... dropped off the boat. Planked. Apparently it's really only functional to use the Mac editor if you have an old old version saved somewhere, because the new download is all kinds of trouble. I've been sorta a squeaky wheel in trying to get them to fix it, but I hate whining and irritating people who I respect. And I really respect the Puzzle Pirates development team. Sigh.

Also, I'm getting to do some actual web design at my job, which is nice. Maybe one day we'll have a gallery of sites that we've done the design for; right now most of their clients are web applications.

Finally... in doing the program design for the upcoming Nimble Arts show and some of the web work I've done recently, I have come to an important realization. I am a font nerd. Oh look-- that's Medusa. Here's some Dragonwick. I like that Optima on your shirt. And speaking of Optima, it's starting to be overly prevalent (as did Mason when it burst on the scene), which means I might have to relinquish my hold on it as my personal font for my resume and letters. Sigh. Optima resumes look so clean. Like I said, font nerd.

(The title of this post comes from the bad techno remix of the Totoro anime theme that my co-worker Josh is currently playing.... The accent on "My Love is Blind" makes it.... piratey. You salty dog.)

Monday, March 06, 2006

8:19 AM - between hail and darkness

two things I learned from the Oscars

The first thing I learned is never to have babies. Seriously. Look at these photos!

   
Before and after having babies.
The other thing I learned is that America sucks. Today, it's Los Angeles and Hollywood specifically. Obviously it's easier to admit that there are still problems after a civil rights movement 40 years ago than to acknowledge that there's a whole group of people who really didn't reap benefits from that civil rights movement at all. Let's not give the top award to the gay film, lest an angry hornets' nest of buzzing Christians swoop down on us like the eighth plague. After all, gay people were responsible for the destruction of the cities on the Plain, right?

I saw both Crash and Brokeback Mountain (it's rare that I would see two Best Picture nominees in one year!!) and I can say that Crash was, quite simply, an amateurish hack. While it was somewhat interesting on a symbolic level, and the circle of characters worked much better if you take them as representational rather than as a contrived real-life circle of individuals, I left the theater thinking that it could have been done much better. Brokeback, by contrast, is both symbolic and individual, and has much more of an emotional impact. All of these rumors of a late swell of support for Crash obviously came from people saying, "Oh noes, we can't have the gay cowboy movie win! Quick, find something else that deals with prejudice!"

Either that, or somebody saw the way Heath Ledger has let himself go, and decided that man couldn't possibly be allowed on stage, no matter the consequences.

Friday, March 03, 2006

8:49 AM - I bet you think this song is about you

It's that time again.

I'm performing on March 17th and 18th at a Nimble Arts student show here in Brattleboro. Click here for details.

I'll be performing my spinning blindfolded piece again, but we've tightened up the choreography and added a couple of new tricks. For all of you locals (because I know that everyone who reads my blog is local to Vermont), come see the show!

I'm actually nervous about how my practices have been going. I've had a lot of runs where I've had a mishap or two and been able to fight through and stay on top of things, but I haven't had a run that's gone perfectly. It's nice to know that I can stay in control and make the piece look smooth, but I feel better when things are perfect and effortless. I guess that's something to aspire to. A weekend or two ago, I watched quite a bit of figure skating thanks to YouTube, and that's actually inspired me to work harder. It's also inspired me to add a skaterish spinning position... we'll see how dorky I look. Finally, I just saw some of what the intermediate trapeze group has been working on, and it makes me anxious because there's more overlap with "my tricks" than the student performance in December. In fact, for this show I'm losing the uniqueness of 3 of my tricks, and one of my sequences seems to be getting hammered over and over. (On the plus side, I've added one of my favorite tricks, and no one else does it.) I'm thinking about re-choreographing a bit, both for the sake of my vanity and so that the audience doesn't have to sit through the same sequences over and over. They are paying, after all. I guess this is what happens when you get a lot of people in the same place who all learn the same things. I wonder how the figure skating moms do it.

Actually, I'm going to stop blogging about it now and write to my trainer instead. Happy Birthday, K!