Here are some posts from the last two weeks of the Greenpage that might be worth your time...
Text of Theresa Rebeck Laura Pels Keynote Address
Women & Hollywood: "Last night I saw someone do something very brave. My friend, Theresa Rebeck, a very successful playwright, TV writer and novelist, got up in front of a group of theatre people and talked about gender. She talked about how her career has been hampered because she is a woman. She talked about how she became toxic after a bad NY Times review. She talked about the abysmal number of plays produced by women. She talked about the missing women’s plays."Why are professors at Harvard, Duke, and Middlebury teaching courses on David Simon's The Wire?
Slate Magazine: "Among the police officers and drug dealers and stickup men and politicians and dockworkers and human smugglers and teachers and students and junkies and lawyers and journalists who populate the late, great HBO series The Wire, there is one academic. His name is David Parenti and he teaches social work at the University of Maryland, Baltimore. He is not a major character, but he appears throughout the show's fourth season—an earnest, well-meaning man defined in part by his naïveté about the inner-city kids whose lives he wants to improve. As for Johns Hopkins, Baltimore's best-known university, it only comes up as a place where the show's police officers can get cushy campus security jobs after they retire. Academia, in other words, is not a culture that the show's creators, David Simon and Ed Burns, betray much interest in exploring."Court Documents: Osorio Wasn't Using the Guard or Rip Fence
Popular Woodworking: "If you're a woodworker, you know about the landmark lawsuit – Carlos Osorio vs. One World Technologies Inc. et al – and about the $1.5 million dollar jury award. Discussions, both for and against the verdict, have been ongoing since the jury decided that One World Technologies (known to us as Ryobi) was at fault. However what most people don't know are the actual facts of this injury. How did Osorio cut his hand? What injuries did he sustain?"MSI: The Science of Storms
abc7chicago.com: "Be blown away by a 40-foot tornado swirling before you. See bolts of lightning crack over your head. Trigger an avalanche. Unleash a tsunami wave. It's all possible beginning March 18, 2010, as the Museum of Science and Industry, Chicago (MSI) unveils Science Storms, an unprecedented and dramatic permanent exhibit in newly-named Allstate Court that reveals the extraordinary science behind some of nature's most powerful and compelling phenomena-tornados, lightning, fire, tsunamis, sunlight, avalanches and atoms in motion."BMW Museum, München
Kinetische Skulptur: "The Kinetic Sculpture is a metaphorical translation of the process of form-finding in art and design. 714 metal spheres, hanging from thin steel wires attached to individually-controlled stepper motors and covering the area of six square meters, animate a seven minute long mechatronic narrative."David Mamet's Master Class Memo to the Writers of The Unit
Movieline: "HERE ARE THE DANGER SIGNALS. ANY TIME TWO CHARACTERS ARE TALKING ABOUT A THIRD, THE SCENE IS A CROCK OF SHIT.
ANY TIME ANY CHARACTER IS SAYING TO ANOTHER “AS YOU KNOW”, THAT IS, TELLING ANOTHER CHARACTER WHAT YOU, THE WRITER, NEED THE AUDIENCE TO KNOW, THE SCENE IS A CROCK OF SHIT.
DO NOT WRITE A CROCK OF SHIT. WRITE A RIPPING THREE, FOUR, SEVEN MINUTE SCENE WHICH MOVES THE STORY ALONG, AND YOU CAN, VERY SOON, BUY A HOUSE IN BEL AIR AND HIRE SOMEONE TO LIVE THERE FOR YOU."
Finishing out the last set. Gonna be time for the next one soon.
The single biggest project I did while at CMU was the TV Project. It isn't really the same sort of thing now.
Nice to be back in the big studio at QED though. Here's some of the kids striking the last of it.
I went back into the hallway of course...
Someplace I have a photo to match this from maybe 1989.
It was my boss' birthday last week.
There was cake at the option coordinator meeting.
The frosh had several personality balloons for their Rube-Goldberg machine. This is the David balloon:
Unfortunately none of the celebrity balloons produced successful trials.
Like I said, it's been a while.
We had rube Goldberg day the other day. PostIt David made another appearance.
I wonder, when human beings are gone and aliens find the Earth if that packing tape will still be intact.
The other night in the shop we were apparently building a boat.
Actually its the front of an oversized drawer. Its good to have clamps.
This is what you don't want to see on the drive box for your brand spanking new deck winch.
All better now though. The FTSI people handled the whole thing great - even FedEx'd me some Locktite.
We've worked our way down to CAD Mastery exams.
The first two I graded were place-outs. I was enthused. It went downhill from there. Confidence is high though.
There's a guy at work Dave Randolph who is called "D.R."
I don't think that's who they meant, but it caught my eye anyway.
So it's been quite some time since I did one of these. I guess I'll split it into a few posts.
Here we are in the basement of Margaret Morrison for a lecture from Len Auerbach on Theatre Architecture.
I have to admit for me it was a real flashback to my second freshman year and "Drama & Ideas" with Scott Cummings. The content was very different though.
Little over two weeks ago this is what the view out my garage door was.
Needless to say we weren't using it as an exit at the time. All melted now.
Every now and then I wonder about what seems the inevitable drive toward more video in theatre productions. Then I see something like this and think everything is going to be just fine.
That's a shot from the opening of our last mainstage production: The Government Inspector.
Here we are all gathered for our season announcement for next year.
I tweeted the event live. I'm not sure my followers cared.
This is what we saw the very first time we tried to use our brand spanking new automation system on an actual production. If you've ever gotten the BSD at home or in your office you don't really know what it feels like until you get one in a time critical environment.
It cleared with a reboot thankfully. I still think the stuff is the bee's knees.
I'm glad there were the "immediate benefits" articles today about the reform package. Without them all I could think about was what we didn't get... Today at work I didn't even get to the stuff that usually keeps me from getting to my work... Looking around the yard we had a lot more damage to trees than you could see when there was still snow on the ground... There's nothing building in our shop this week, and it's never been more crowded... I wish the Dodge dealer would stop sending mailers. Now that I own the thing I am going to drive it forever - send the adverts to the single guys... The ground seems to have finally dried out a little, much less squishy... I think we fired Comcast today. Probably well past time... I think I picked up a rigging class side gig for the summer. Just need to get a little momentum behind it. Four per year would be nice... Once again I am toying with the idea of unfriending/unfollowing day... One of the things that got in front of work today was a technical design brainstorming session. My eventual solution? Do nothing - always popular... I heard today CMU changed the carnival rules so that there can be no single piece of a booth bigger than can be carried by six people. So much for fraternities carrying finished structures down Forbes. Too bad, that was one of my favorite bits of CMU culture... Is AIM over? None of the new kids chat at me on AIM... I've given it serious consideration and I think I really need to remodel/redecorate/rearrange my office at school. Now I just need ideas... Looking at a years worth of debit and credit card transactions is like life archeology. Fun to see what we spent where. Not so fun to see how much we spent anywhere...
So, today I did a really simple project - a project that should have totaled less than $20 - except for the unfortunate position of the work.
So, yes that is a $13 vent cover (falling ice K-O'd the original) and a much more than $13 extension ladder. Also today I discovered I appear to have mislaid my toolbelt (with I have had since I was maybe 18). Here's hoping its somewhere in the house, missing tools usually are.
Its a nice ladder anyway. But it'd be nicer to not have to spend 20 times the value of the repair on the equipment. Now I have to figure out how to store the thing.
Year number four for the Critical Path/Rube Goldberg project. If we checked the scoreboard this morning it would have been 1-1-1. Have to call the first year a tie because they eventually got the thing to work, I think, maybe. Maybe it should be 1-2.
This years group managed to get their machine to run all the way through with maybe 2 minutes left in class; something around the 9th or 10th try. It was a little more difficult to watch because there wasn't really a "front." I guess maybe I need to tweak the instructions to make the thing a little more visual rather than just being about sequential triggering.
Still, all in all a good effort all around.
And more than anything else, people appear to have a good time with the thing.
So now classes are 2-1-1 against the Rube Goldberg challenge. I wonder how they'll do next year.
Here are some posts form the last two weeks of the Greenpage that might be worth your time:
Astana State Auditorium by Studio Nicoletti
CONTEMPORIST: "This auditorium – one of the largest in the world – was awarded to Studio Nicoletti as the result of an International restricted competition. Founded in the heart of the steppes only four years after the Independence of the Country, Astana is now a decade old new capital of Kazakhstan."Obama effects change on stage
Variety: "There's an ironically presented black minstrel show at the Vineyard Theater. There's a darkly comic wrestling match with retro racial stereotypes at the Public Theater. At Playwrights Horizons, white characters and black characters try to talk about race, and mostly fail.
See a pattern?
Legit productions about race in America are proliferating this season, with a handful opening in quick succession this spring at Off Broadway venues. It's a remarkable topical shift that coincides with the age of Obama -- and one that hasn't been played out to an equal degree in TV or film."Ben Cameron Speaks Out
a poor player: "Ben Cameron is the Program Director for the Arts at the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and former Theatre Communications Group director, and in this talk he speaks about the future of the arts that points the way towards a more de-centralized and participatory model."Lumber prices at their highest in years
The Hardware Aisle: "If you're about to start any projects that are going to require lumber, like say a framing walls or a building a pull-down attic staircase, you might want to hold off a bit."SETC 2010 Podcast
TACT: "The following presentation is not exactly a podcast, because we were not sitting in front of microphones mixing our voices to create a clean sound. Rather, we recorded our presentation live at SETC during our presentation “What Are We Doing?: Re-thinking the Theatre Arts Curriculum.”"
My blogging mojo has just got up and went... Nice to see our congressmen saving student loans for the banks and payday loans for - I don't know who for... If it were up to me, distributing malware would be actionable. Come to think of it, why isn't it actionable? Ought to be... Now I guess we ought to actually go out and see The Hurt Locker... We've been on vacation three days now. I think I've worked 22 hours. I guess that's less than 24... Still don't know if it is time to get excited about health insurance reform. I guess I still feel a little burned from the Clinton years... Its been very melty here lately, but alas still not melty enough to use the whole driveway... Its the time of the year I ought to be paying attention to Basketball, but I haven't really cared in a very long time. Maybe if Pittsburgh had a team... I made my plane reservations for USITT, and I don't even have to go left to go right... Can't BELIEVE a Denver school dropped two kids because of lesbian parents - even if it is a religious school. The best way to get what you want isn't to punish the kids (oh, and what you do want is deplorable)... Those stairs, the ones for Richard, they don't look as big as I have seen them in my head... think I can get the kids to have a Playground week Ultimate tourney? Might be fun... For some reason the new Clubworld just never comes, maybe we have to re-up... I think we're going to try to do the taxes thing tomorrow. Maybe I will dream up some new deductions tonight... The coughing thing appears to have stopped, although I wouldn't want to jinx it... I heard the renewed Fringe for next year, now can they get on it and renew Caprica? I don't think that's asking too much... Do you think millionaire athletes need a "how not to get charged with sexual misconduct class?" That'd be a real shame... I've been having a longish email exchange about the state of theatre education. Maybe that has a post in it... I think I am looking for summer work. Anyone want a rigging class? I thought I had a nibble, but maybe not... Seems like I should be looking into PMP certification. Last time I looked it seemed kind of expensive... At least this machine isn't munged up - yet. Thanks for small favors...
Specifically the Jed Harris makeover...
From Anne's photoshop class and the "hair switch" project.
Here are some posts from the past week of the Greenpage that might be worth your time:
W+K Old Spice Making Of…
(NOTCOT): "Now even more fascinating, i love the interview embedded after the jump where “Leo Laporte interviews Craig Allen and Eric Kallman of Wieden + Kennedy to find out how Old Spice “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like” was made.” ~ And it just gets MORE amazing. They did it in practically one shot on a 3 day shoot… building half a boat on the beach at the waters edge ~ having a shower set that gets crane lifted away ~ and as he sits down on a mechanism that rolls him onto a real horse! The only CG stuff ~ they painted out the device… and they superimposed the overflowing diamonds that were coming out of a fake hand…"Detroit residents can apply for free film technician training
MLive.com: "Governor Jennifer M. Granholm, Detroit Mayor Dave Bing, and Wayne County Executive Robert A. Ficano announced a federal grant that will allow Detroit residents to apply for training to work in Michigan's growing film industry."Long Reach Long Riders (LRLR) to Hold Raffle at USITT
iSquint.net: "The Long Reach Long Riders, the charitable motorcycle ride to help provide funds for the ESTA Foundation Behind the Scenes program has just announced their 2010 raffle at USITT. On April 2nd, 2010, The Long Reach Long Riders will be holding their annual raffle in the Behind the Scenes booth at the USITT Stage Expo in Kansas City."Anybody for a Threesome?
Backstage: "The American Federation of Television and Radio Artists will hold its monthly national board meeting Feb. 27. There, a subcommittee created last month is expected to recommend whether AFTRA should re-enter joint bargaining with the Screen Actors Guild on its prime-time television contract. AFTRA broke away from joint bargaining in 2008, when Alan Rosenberg, a vocal critic of AFTRA, was president of SAG. But since then, changes in SAG's leadership have reopened the door to closer cooperation between the two unions. Ken Howard, who was elected SAG president last year on a platform that promoted the eventual merger of SAG and AFTRA, told Back Stage in January that a return to joint bargaining 'will be a huge step toward mending a lot of fences.'"Video projection has an expanding role in mainstream theater
The Boston Globe: "In Clifford Odets’s “Paradise Lost,’’ Ben Gordon is an unsuccessful former Olympic track star who remains, in his own mind, the “champ miler of the world.’’
The idea of getting into his mind intrigued Daniel Fish, who is directing the American Repertory Theater’s production of this drama about a family’s shattered dreams, now playing at the Loeb Drama Center. Fish wanted to find a way to convey what Ben himself envisioned when he reflected on his glory days. But how to depict, in theater, someone’s private ruminations?
His answer: video."
