puzzle piece one
So... i'm breaking from my journal of commands, and my journal of recommendations... just for a little while. just this little bit about my life:
First, I had a somewhat breakthrough today. I've been fairly down lately, just unable to mobilize, unable/unwilling to get out of bed, just down. you know that empty feeling that makes you not want to do anything, and makes you doubt everything about yourself- especially anything that might be positive. Well, I got pretty upset today, and talked/yelled with my dad. And, as usual, he had some insight. Basically it boiled down to trying to bite off more than i can chew, trying to run before i can crawl, all those good metaphors. Thinking too far ahead-- about starting a company, how to start directing, etc, and not dealing with the present, like passing my classes, being with my friends, getting an apartment, working out the job situation, etc. Because of this grand scheme thinking, i started getting overwhelmed, and full of this feeling that i couldn't accomplish anything. It's just what happened with my philosophy paper: I wanted to do a GREAT job on it so much that I stressed out, and put it off, and worried, and obsessed so much, that I didn't do such a great job on it and handed it in late. When if i had just paced myself and not stressed as much, i might have had enough time. And then let's not forget the beating-myself-up part. and i can beat myself up about anything... So- I'm going to try to put some of my larger goals on the back burner for a while, deal with what i have to get done now, stop obsessing about the future, and do my darndest to relax and stop self-flagellating (much as christina and i do enjoy it with our tea at 4 every wednesday in the parlour). it helped to put things a little bit in perspective.
then in the evening I saw Wilburn (that's right folks, he still exists!), which was great-- i miss him a lot. And then I met up with Kendra and we had a great time seeing the revival of Fatboy, the show I worked on two summers ago in NYC and Edinburgh. Lots of talk about boys and their ways, and a drink after the show.
Yesterday I saw Cori, and we had a great time just catching up and trading stories and news ("She didn't." "She did!" "No." YES!" "OH, MY GOD." "I KNOW." *giggle giggle giggle*). We sat in this cute little vegetarian place where the owner, this adorable older man, kept giving us free cookies.
OK. I apologize for the deviation, but here's my usual stuff, in no particular order.
Dirty Rotten Scoundrels
If you're looking for a broadway show that has a great sense of humor, and is full of talent and personality, go for this. It's not a mind fuck, not particularly deep, but has a great plot, fantastic lyrics, a good solid twist-- and every bad pun or joke possible? yeah, they go there (which might just be why I loved it so much).
Jonathan Pryce is fabulously classy-- for those of you who just saw Brazil, where he plays a very un-suave bureaucrat hero, come see the flip side- he's sexy as Larry... whoever he is. Norbert Leo Butz is outrageous. Twitchy, vulgar, brilliantly-timed.
Sweeney Todd
While I'm doing broadway musicals, this i think is one of the best things out there right now. Spelling Bee is up there too. But this is the most creative staging of a broadway musical i think i've ever seen. The actors also serve as the orchestra, and the work with the instrumetns is beautifully choreographed-- they seem like secondary characters and the music serves as a second text. Simple, pared-down, clear.
Ok. I don't know if i wrote about this before, but.....
Janet Cardiff's the Forty-Part Motet, at Moma
It closed on Monday (alas alack), but if you ever see her name again, RUN DO NOT WALK to go see whatever it is she's worked on. I'll tell you why in a minute, put your friggin pants back on. Here's a link to various sites about her: http://www.the-artists.org/ArtistView.cfm?id=8A01F1ED-BBCF-11D4-A93500D0B7069B40
particularly good was the interview with her: http://www.bombmagazine.com/cardiff/cardiff.html
ok and here's why. The forty part motet was a sound exhibit based on a Thomas Tallis choral piece that was written in honor of Queen Elizabeth I's 40th birthday. It is a stunning piece. Cardiff recorded it and assigned one speaker to each voice, and arranged these forty speakers, on stands, in an oval in eight groups of five. When you enter the exhibit, you walk into the oval, and you've never heard surround sound like this. If you sit in the center, you will be struck by how the piece moves from group to group, the sound travelling around the room. You can also encounter each voice individually, putting your ear up to each speaker. It gives you a very unique look at the piece, hearing it from a single perspective, distorting the immensely complicated harmonies created by all forty voices. Not only this, but after viewing the exhibit (for several hours at a clip when i went with Carl, who is even more obsessed with the exhibit than i am) several times, i feel like i know some of the people behind the speakers. I've heard them cough in the middle of a line, mess up the words, and even talk to each other before beginning the recording. But besides giving the listener a completely unique perspective on the piece, Cardiff is up to something else. She has created a sculpture of sorts, what with the way the music moves around the room, and the layout of the room itself, but also with the people in the room. Cardiff has made the viewers unwitting (and sometimes unwilling, as Carl and I discovered) participants in a vast, ever-changing scupture. In a way, it was very very theatrical. People moved in response to the music, and everyone had different reactions. They reacted to each other, but without ever communicating directly. It seemed like many people had emotional experiences, and were sharing them with other people in the room-- yet there was very little direct communication that I noticed between these viewers. It was fascinating to watch how everyone reacted and interacted with the piece. Is is a piece of art? sculpture? music? installation? can i touch it? can i talk? can i dance? i had a fantasy of building a movement piece in the room itself, seeing how many strangers i could involve in it. It was other-worldly- a sanctuary- portable sanctity. And I think this sanctity was partially accomplished by how casual and human the voices were. The recording was far from perfect- there were errors- voices cracked, singers made late entrances, etc. Together, you never heard these mistakes. But because you were able to confront each voice individually, you could find them. you could walk among them. then, the fact that cardiff left in bits of tape that had the singers casually talking with each other leads me to believe that we are meant to hear them as people, not angels. i had a flash of a vision where everyone in the room turned into a member of the clergy in the renaissance or some removed time, in a garden with cloisters, where the choir was practicing in a nearby room, and everyone was taking their daily meditative walk. the music, heavenly as it is, was given a distinctly human feel, without any physical vestiges of the singers themselves- nothing but their voices, though the speakers were at head height.
Read some of Cardiff's comments. There's more to say about this fantastic exhibit- there was always more to discover every time i went. She has a sense of how to affect people, and an interest in how her audience interacts with her work. If anyone else has seen this, i'm interested in others' experiences.
Edvard Munch at Moma
I don't know why I thought I knew Munch's work. Maybe I was confusing him with Van Gogh. Really, I only know the Scream, and only because it is unavoidable- it's on mousepads, posters- i've even seen a little doll made to look like the screaming guy.
This exhibit is a huge retrospective of Munch's work, and it is beautiful. I have qualms about the way it is laid out- it's not quite chronological, but you can still somewhat chart his process/progress. The man was a beautiful, beautiful painter. i love retrospectives because they give you a chance to see bits of the artists' brains- what they were exposed to, what other schools of art were floating around at the time, memorable events in their lives. There were some really memorable pieces: one was The Day After (something like that), one was called Melancholy, one was a huge painting of several naked men on a beach that was just gorgeous... there was a series of self portraits, one called Self Portrait With Cigarette (there are two, the larger, and earlier one is striking). His etchings/woodcuts/lithographs were otherworldly, really modern looking. He just captures movement so well, and as is implied by the Scream's popularity, emotion, particularly the darker recesses of the brain. He's just very expressive, touching. go see it, it's up for a while.
PS 1
I finally made it over there. It is a bizzare place. I think i have to go back to reinvestigate. While I wasn't so struck by the exhibits, the building itself is really really cool. I kind of wish they had left parts of it alone, more like a school (the building's original purpose), but even though they moma-fied it, the architecture still shows through.
One great exhibit- a roomful of works by photographer Peter Hujar, a contemporary and friend of Diane Arbus. I hadn't heard of him really, but some of his portraits of drag queens and circus workers were fantastic-- full of texture, and revealing multiple layers of the performer- mask and mask-wearer. like Arbus, he has a penchant for the grotesque, the backstage story, exposing the underbelly, and the just plain beautiful.
All in all, worth the trip. i have to poke around that neighborhood more- seems like a cool place to live.
I also saw Transamerica, a very touching movie with Felicity Huffman. She plays a transexual about to complete her sex change from man to woman, who discovers that she fathered a son way back when. It becomes a sort of road-trip movie, with adventures and whatnot. The best part was Huffman's performance- took a lot of heart.
Saw Crash... jesus christ i'm never moving to LA. It reminded me of Anna Deveare Smith's Twilight Los Angeles. really upsetting, but, i'm glad it won the oscar over say...brokeback mountain.
what else....?
saw Fatboy, revived from its bloody grave. It was the show I worked on two summers ago with John Clancy, and i really liked his rewrites. I think it's open for like, two more days. lampoons American greed and political corruption. there is blood, really fast talk, some fat-suits, gratuitous sex, judicial corruption, and some props that I made myself!
i can't think of anything else right now.
back to war and peace.
Tomorrow I go back to Moma, see Carl and Tommy's show, Impasse, and on Saturday, probably the Neue Gallerie for the Klee exhibit with Mom- maybe hitting up Cafe Sabarsky and possibly even a play.
Break has been emotional, but ya can't say i didn't see some great stuff!
night guys.
First, I had a somewhat breakthrough today. I've been fairly down lately, just unable to mobilize, unable/unwilling to get out of bed, just down. you know that empty feeling that makes you not want to do anything, and makes you doubt everything about yourself- especially anything that might be positive. Well, I got pretty upset today, and talked/yelled with my dad. And, as usual, he had some insight. Basically it boiled down to trying to bite off more than i can chew, trying to run before i can crawl, all those good metaphors. Thinking too far ahead-- about starting a company, how to start directing, etc, and not dealing with the present, like passing my classes, being with my friends, getting an apartment, working out the job situation, etc. Because of this grand scheme thinking, i started getting overwhelmed, and full of this feeling that i couldn't accomplish anything. It's just what happened with my philosophy paper: I wanted to do a GREAT job on it so much that I stressed out, and put it off, and worried, and obsessed so much, that I didn't do such a great job on it and handed it in late. When if i had just paced myself and not stressed as much, i might have had enough time. And then let's not forget the beating-myself-up part. and i can beat myself up about anything... So- I'm going to try to put some of my larger goals on the back burner for a while, deal with what i have to get done now, stop obsessing about the future, and do my darndest to relax and stop self-flagellating (much as christina and i do enjoy it with our tea at 4 every wednesday in the parlour). it helped to put things a little bit in perspective.
then in the evening I saw Wilburn (that's right folks, he still exists!), which was great-- i miss him a lot. And then I met up with Kendra and we had a great time seeing the revival of Fatboy, the show I worked on two summers ago in NYC and Edinburgh. Lots of talk about boys and their ways, and a drink after the show.
Yesterday I saw Cori, and we had a great time just catching up and trading stories and news ("She didn't." "She did!" "No." YES!" "OH, MY GOD." "I KNOW." *giggle giggle giggle*). We sat in this cute little vegetarian place where the owner, this adorable older man, kept giving us free cookies.
OK. I apologize for the deviation, but here's my usual stuff, in no particular order.
Dirty Rotten Scoundrels
If you're looking for a broadway show that has a great sense of humor, and is full of talent and personality, go for this. It's not a mind fuck, not particularly deep, but has a great plot, fantastic lyrics, a good solid twist-- and every bad pun or joke possible? yeah, they go there (which might just be why I loved it so much).
Jonathan Pryce is fabulously classy-- for those of you who just saw Brazil, where he plays a very un-suave bureaucrat hero, come see the flip side- he's sexy as Larry... whoever he is. Norbert Leo Butz is outrageous. Twitchy, vulgar, brilliantly-timed.
Sweeney Todd
While I'm doing broadway musicals, this i think is one of the best things out there right now. Spelling Bee is up there too. But this is the most creative staging of a broadway musical i think i've ever seen. The actors also serve as the orchestra, and the work with the instrumetns is beautifully choreographed-- they seem like secondary characters and the music serves as a second text. Simple, pared-down, clear.
Ok. I don't know if i wrote about this before, but.....
Janet Cardiff's the Forty-Part Motet, at Moma
It closed on Monday (alas alack), but if you ever see her name again, RUN DO NOT WALK to go see whatever it is she's worked on. I'll tell you why in a minute, put your friggin pants back on. Here's a link to various sites about her: http://www.the-artists.org/ArtistView.cfm?id=8A01F1ED-BBCF-11D4-A93500D0B7069B40
particularly good was the interview with her: http://www.bombmagazine.com/cardiff/cardiff.html
ok and here's why. The forty part motet was a sound exhibit based on a Thomas Tallis choral piece that was written in honor of Queen Elizabeth I's 40th birthday. It is a stunning piece. Cardiff recorded it and assigned one speaker to each voice, and arranged these forty speakers, on stands, in an oval in eight groups of five. When you enter the exhibit, you walk into the oval, and you've never heard surround sound like this. If you sit in the center, you will be struck by how the piece moves from group to group, the sound travelling around the room. You can also encounter each voice individually, putting your ear up to each speaker. It gives you a very unique look at the piece, hearing it from a single perspective, distorting the immensely complicated harmonies created by all forty voices. Not only this, but after viewing the exhibit (for several hours at a clip when i went with Carl, who is even more obsessed with the exhibit than i am) several times, i feel like i know some of the people behind the speakers. I've heard them cough in the middle of a line, mess up the words, and even talk to each other before beginning the recording. But besides giving the listener a completely unique perspective on the piece, Cardiff is up to something else. She has created a sculpture of sorts, what with the way the music moves around the room, and the layout of the room itself, but also with the people in the room. Cardiff has made the viewers unwitting (and sometimes unwilling, as Carl and I discovered) participants in a vast, ever-changing scupture. In a way, it was very very theatrical. People moved in response to the music, and everyone had different reactions. They reacted to each other, but without ever communicating directly. It seemed like many people had emotional experiences, and were sharing them with other people in the room-- yet there was very little direct communication that I noticed between these viewers. It was fascinating to watch how everyone reacted and interacted with the piece. Is is a piece of art? sculpture? music? installation? can i touch it? can i talk? can i dance? i had a fantasy of building a movement piece in the room itself, seeing how many strangers i could involve in it. It was other-worldly- a sanctuary- portable sanctity. And I think this sanctity was partially accomplished by how casual and human the voices were. The recording was far from perfect- there were errors- voices cracked, singers made late entrances, etc. Together, you never heard these mistakes. But because you were able to confront each voice individually, you could find them. you could walk among them. then, the fact that cardiff left in bits of tape that had the singers casually talking with each other leads me to believe that we are meant to hear them as people, not angels. i had a flash of a vision where everyone in the room turned into a member of the clergy in the renaissance or some removed time, in a garden with cloisters, where the choir was practicing in a nearby room, and everyone was taking their daily meditative walk. the music, heavenly as it is, was given a distinctly human feel, without any physical vestiges of the singers themselves- nothing but their voices, though the speakers were at head height.
Read some of Cardiff's comments. There's more to say about this fantastic exhibit- there was always more to discover every time i went. She has a sense of how to affect people, and an interest in how her audience interacts with her work. If anyone else has seen this, i'm interested in others' experiences.
Edvard Munch at Moma
I don't know why I thought I knew Munch's work. Maybe I was confusing him with Van Gogh. Really, I only know the Scream, and only because it is unavoidable- it's on mousepads, posters- i've even seen a little doll made to look like the screaming guy.
This exhibit is a huge retrospective of Munch's work, and it is beautiful. I have qualms about the way it is laid out- it's not quite chronological, but you can still somewhat chart his process/progress. The man was a beautiful, beautiful painter. i love retrospectives because they give you a chance to see bits of the artists' brains- what they were exposed to, what other schools of art were floating around at the time, memorable events in their lives. There were some really memorable pieces: one was The Day After (something like that), one was called Melancholy, one was a huge painting of several naked men on a beach that was just gorgeous... there was a series of self portraits, one called Self Portrait With Cigarette (there are two, the larger, and earlier one is striking). His etchings/woodcuts/lithographs were otherworldly, really modern looking. He just captures movement so well, and as is implied by the Scream's popularity, emotion, particularly the darker recesses of the brain. He's just very expressive, touching. go see it, it's up for a while.
PS 1
I finally made it over there. It is a bizzare place. I think i have to go back to reinvestigate. While I wasn't so struck by the exhibits, the building itself is really really cool. I kind of wish they had left parts of it alone, more like a school (the building's original purpose), but even though they moma-fied it, the architecture still shows through.
One great exhibit- a roomful of works by photographer Peter Hujar, a contemporary and friend of Diane Arbus. I hadn't heard of him really, but some of his portraits of drag queens and circus workers were fantastic-- full of texture, and revealing multiple layers of the performer- mask and mask-wearer. like Arbus, he has a penchant for the grotesque, the backstage story, exposing the underbelly, and the just plain beautiful.
All in all, worth the trip. i have to poke around that neighborhood more- seems like a cool place to live.
I also saw Transamerica, a very touching movie with Felicity Huffman. She plays a transexual about to complete her sex change from man to woman, who discovers that she fathered a son way back when. It becomes a sort of road-trip movie, with adventures and whatnot. The best part was Huffman's performance- took a lot of heart.
Saw Crash... jesus christ i'm never moving to LA. It reminded me of Anna Deveare Smith's Twilight Los Angeles. really upsetting, but, i'm glad it won the oscar over say...brokeback mountain.
what else....?
saw Fatboy, revived from its bloody grave. It was the show I worked on two summers ago with John Clancy, and i really liked his rewrites. I think it's open for like, two more days. lampoons American greed and political corruption. there is blood, really fast talk, some fat-suits, gratuitous sex, judicial corruption, and some props that I made myself!
i can't think of anything else right now.
back to war and peace.
Tomorrow I go back to Moma, see Carl and Tommy's show, Impasse, and on Saturday, probably the Neue Gallerie for the Klee exhibit with Mom- maybe hitting up Cafe Sabarsky and possibly even a play.
Break has been emotional, but ya can't say i didn't see some great stuff!
night guys.