This week's stories:
1. Underweight models BANNED in Israel to fight anorexia: New law forces women in ads to stay healthy (and faked images have to be identified too)
2. Go Bionic With These Wearable Arduino Projects
3. Interactive theatre: five rules of play from an audience perspective
4. Ohio High School Fires Director for Staging Legally Blonde Musical; Creators and Parents Comment
5. Video: George Lucas Talks Future of 'Star Wars' and Lucasfilm
6. Reality shows may put crews too close to cutting edge
7. Utah School Stops Musical Because of 'Sexually Suggestive' Elvis Songs
8. Aubrey Ireland, College Student, Wins Restraining Order Against Helicopter Parents
9. We are in the middle of an arts reformation!
10.Why we're not done talking about diversity.
Featuring: Taylor, Cat, Dale, Lauren, and Matt
Plus BONUS JAKE!
Monday, February 04, 2013
#NFTRW Podcast
Sunday, February 03, 2013
Interview Hyjinks
I'm away on the road interviewing earnest young theatre artists who are burning inside to be Design & Production.
Yesterday I got to the building and checked in and got in the elevator to ride up to the offices. On the elevator with me was a girl and her mother. The girl was obviously an earnest young theatre designer. I could tell this by her d-sheet sized portfolio - well that wasn't the only reason.
Anyway, I say to the girl "here for interviews?"
and she "says yeah, for like three schools."
to which I respond "well, I hope your interviews suck!"
and her mother looks at me like I am a crazy person. It was priceless.
It was also not nearly as scandalous as it sounds. The girl was one of our previous precollege students, one we have previously admitted to the School of Drama and one I am really hoping comes to Carnegie.
So more of a backhanded compliment.
Thursday, January 31, 2013
Ellipses...
Thirty one posts in thirty one days!!! Sometimes at work I wonder if we've ever done any of this stuff before, because the alternate is that we're not very good... Congressional hearings appear to be more about forcing witnesses into embarrassing soundbites than about discovering or disseminating anything... I could have swore it was like 60 degrees here just yesterday... Probably nobody is all that interested in the complete history of my toolbox... Going to New York for the weekend. Got to meet new students to teach to make the donuts... I spent the afternoon prepping a lecture for class because I was sure I didn't have enough content for the day - and then I never got to it... Don't you think once you have contributed to NPR during a pledge drive you should be able to listen without the soliciting? That would be killer... I printed two boarding passes today. For some reason that required six sheets of paper... After nearly two years it looks like the SOD schedule gridlock project is winding up. All that is left is room assignments and crying... When they say that people with a history of mental illness won't be able to purchase guns, just who do they mean? Somehow I'm not sure that would have helped in the prior cases... DVR'd "The Americans" last night. I wonder if it will be any good... I have some friends that still chat over Twitter. it may be time to unfollow them... Mostly I think if your power tool system is designed to replace 7 tools, that it probably doesn't replace any of them very well... I was asked to review an outside candidate for their RTP process. Seems like it is going to be very difficult for me not to use here as a measure... But thirty one posts in thirty one days! I bet there will be a substantial drop off now...
Wednesday, January 30, 2013
So Here's What Happened
Last night I got derailed early in the morning while trying to post - even though I had once again missed the 12:00am deadline. In case you are keeping track, here's what happened.
The problem is attributable to technology mostly. It's been longer than I can remember since I turned on my desktop on a regular basis. My power PC has basically been relegated to deep storage for photos and music and the place I sync my iOS devices. Evenings in our home usually see computing happening on laptops or even more often on tablets.
Tablets are the best. One of the coolest things about them is that they power up like phones. No waiting for the thing to boot. You slide off the cover and there it is. Even the laptops take a couple of minutes to cycle through their startup sequence. So if I have a small task to do online, rather than boot up the tower or even the laptop I normally just grab the tablet.
There was an original problem with the tablet when it came to blogging. The touchscreen keyboard wasn't the greatest option for typing out anything more than a couple of lines. But somewhere along the way I solved that with an external bluetooth keyboard.
So then I had a quick booting device with a good way to type longer items.
Interestingly, as it turns out, when using the blogger.com site there were some small conflicts when using the iOS device. So even with a keyboard, blogging was not really possible. Eventually I found the Blogsy app, and then the Blogger iOS app some time later.
This brings us to last night. Having missed the deadline I didn't want to wait for a device to boot. I had actually planned what the post was going to be writing. It had several photos which I had taken earlier in the day. I was actually a little stoked because through various cloud application setups I was going to be able to blog on the tablet using photos I took with my phone earlier without ever having to download the phone. Seamless things like that are really cool.
I may not know how to use the thing, but it appears to me that making a post with a photo (or multiple photos) using the Blogger app only allows the photo to appear at the end of the post. That wasn't going to work for what I was writing.
Conveniently the Blogsy app does allow for images to be placed any place within the post. I guess my preference has been to use the Blogger app because it is somewhat more spartan. The very lack of bells and whistles that would keep me from doing what I wanted to do in this case is the thing that takes me to that app in general. And so I wrote the post using the Blogsy app.
I wrote the whole post and embedded the images where they went and everything was swell. Then, I went to publish and... nothing. The app would say it was prepping to post and then it would just stop. I tried over and over and got no place.
It turns out I was doing something wrong and the app did a lousy job of telling me I was doing it wrong.
Posting images to a blog is a fairly simple but specific purpose. None of the authoring tools I have used do it totally seamlessly. Were it not for the placement of the image I guess the blogger app is actually the most transparent. In the other cases, you have to identify and upload the image as a slightly separate process than uploading the post.
On Blogsy, for local photos - which is what I was using - you have to identify on online photo hosting site and then pre-load the image to that site as a prep step for writing the post. I had seen something on one of the dialog boxes that had me under the impression that they had automated that process in the last app update. So this time I just drag and dropped my photos where I wanted them and kept on writing.
I guess I read the notice wrong, because when I went to post it didn't. Eventually I deleted all the photos. Went back a step and uploaded them to Picasa and then re-inserted them into the post, went to publish and EUREKA! There it was.
So all is well that ends well and now the world can learn all about the history of tool storage in my life. Sometimes the #21stCenturyProblems make my head hurt.
A Complete History of David's Toolbox
I found myself today spending some time talking about tools and toolboxes. For me it all started with the belt above. When I went to work for Chicago Scenic one summer I had to buy a list of handtools and something to carry them with. I bought this pouch then and still have it today. It's a little more broken in now than it was then.
When I returned to school in the fall I needed an actual tool box and so I got something solid and modest:
Again I am not sure how or why but I still have the thing, it's empty now just sitting in the garage waiting for some kind of task. This box was pretty basic. Hard to find anything. But it did the job.
Once I left school and started work I needed something a little more... more:
This was my box through my stint as a LORT carpenter and all the way through stock and grad school. I beat the hell out of this thing. It was rode hard and put away wet. That right latch no longer functions and didn't for some time even when I was using it. This box was great, really easy to keep organized - simple to find things. If anything it was just too heavy. Ok to leave at a worksite. Not so great for packing in and out. Thankfully I didn't do much of that.
The Rally Box and the Original box were joined by a Rubbermaid thing and a box Sears called the SST for my summer stock years:
This was a pretty good lineup. My regular tools went in the Rally box and then I had a lot of space for overflow and safety gear and hardware. That SST box was (ok, is - yes, these are ALL still sitting in the garage) a beast. Way WAY to heavy to be practical. Eventually they reissued the thing with wheels and a handle for dragging. Much more practical that way. But still, I was starting to travel with power tools and while most of them had their own boxes I still needed the volume.
Somewhere in here there is a missing toolbox. When I worked in the NYC shop I had to pack tools in and out but had too many for the pouch. The rally box was too heavy so I bought a soft side bag. It was a blue synthetic thing and somewhere along the way I must have totally trashed it, because it is not hanging out in my garage.
After that things may have come off the rails a little. When I went out West I ditched pretty much all of the individual boxes in favor of one big box:
The idea was that I would have secure storage for all of my tools in one place. So all of the power tools tht had their own cases got pulled out, the cases hung out in the rafters of my parents garage and the individual tools lived in here. Boxes just took up space. So because of that, the four box summer stock line up got reduced to a milk crate that lived in the JobBox and then these:
Done In By Technology
I had a perfectly good post for tonight. It had a bunch of photos and this app doesn't seem to have a graceful way to post photos amongst text - just puts them at the end. There's no fun there. So I used the other app I have for publishing to the blog and for reasons beyond me it just won't publish.
Maybe I'll have more luck tomorrow.
Monday, January 28, 2013
Vote for Comment of the Week
Here are this week's contenders:
Student #1: has left a new comment on your post "Utah School Stops Musical Because of 'Sexually Sug...":
This reminds me of my experience with my parents when doing my first High School Musical; "RENT". Unfamiliar with story and the true meaning of the play, and reason for its importance they were unhappy with the content and that we were allowed to do it as high school students. It containing drugs, aids, homosexuality, sex, etc...the main focus was LOVE, and how important it is to give and receive love no matter what you have and what your going through because ultimately, to love is why we've been put on this earth.Student #2: has left a new comment on your post "Aubrey Ireland, College Student, Wins Restraining ...":
With all of that being said, I think the best way to measure a show, is to recognize its message, and to look at the good of the show and how it can impact lives, rather than the little worldly things that are in the mix of the true message. The arts are only reflections of our reality...do people not look at themselves in the mirror everyday before leaving the house for work, school, outings, etc.?
I think helicopter parents are the worst thing that has happened to this generation of young adults. By the age of 18 (and for many of us, before then) we've learned how to do our laundry, cook our own food, make our own friends, make decisions about our body, earn our own money and choose how to spend it, choose how we work and what we like to work on. I'm very grateful that my mother took a hands-off approach in raising me, because I learned to be independent early on, making my life as a young adult much easier. I cannot even imagine what my life would be like if my mother had decided to be a hovering sort of parent. I'm very glad that this student was able to escape from under her parents. Being the major funder of a college education doesn't make someone your master. If a debt institution had set in place monitoring systems on her cell phone and computer, it would be a breach of civil rights and there would be no debate as to how wrong this is. In this case, her parents were using the fact that they were paying for her education as handcuffs, and they choose to monitor her life. They were in essence a sort of debt service, and it doesn't matter who or what does monitoring of this sort, if an adult doesn't want to be watched, he or she shouldn't be.Student #3: has left a new comment on your post "The Evolution of Asian Eyebrows: A (Dia)critical C...":
wow, do some things go unnoticed. I remember when Les Miserable came out, many of my costume design friends were complaining that Anne Hathaway's eyebrows were far to perfect to fit the time period, but none of them have eve mentioned the false stereotype in asian yellow face eyebrows. I'll admit I didn't even think twice about the eyebrows in "Cloud Atlas" I just took what I saw as reality. Because this style eyebrow has been around for so long, I think society has just stopped second guessing it. but now that I think about it more it really is a problem. Why do we have to exaggerate someones eyebrows just to be across a point. Also, why does to shape of the eyebros have to be such an "evil" one. It all seems quite racist.Student #4: has left a new comment on your post "TV episodes dropped after US shootings":
I long for the day when people will admit that PARENTING is the main issue here! You are in control of shaping your child until they go to school and then they are influenced by their peers and even then, good parenting still reigns over ALL! Regulate what your children watch, regulate what they do. Form good relationships with them, talk to them, educate them.Student #5: has left a new comment on your post "It’s All About “Process”":
I watched many violent films and played many violent games as a child, but am I out there shooting up people? NO! Why? Because I understand the difference between fiction and reality. I also have a great value and respect for life. This was instilled in me from a very early age and still is now. Even when there was no television/media people (Greeks, Romans) were still fighting and killing over land, power and for pure greed. This sad aspect is the unfortunate element of human nature. However now it is seen as a cool thing to have a gun/weapon and use it. Killing innocents because you are angry or simply because you want to. Some people have no value for life and I think that this is the bigger issue!!
--OPPOSING VIEW WARNING--Put your votes in the comments here.
It's interesting to me that the new play competitions and festivals featured here all have an element of brevity - from the ten-minute play festival to the theatre that asks for only the first ten pages (because "if you've got it, it should be obvious"). It's less of an encouragement and fostering and more of an audition for the playwright's tone and style when put before an audience. Are those the merits of a playwright, being able to tell their story in ten minutes? Or is it enough (reasonable?) to expect that someone who can weave an intriguing nugget can then sufficiently stretch a story to 90 or 120 minutes? Over two acts? I take issue with these abbreviated play festivals, not because of commercial success (the descriptions of avid attendance dismiss that notion), but because it's not necessarily representative of the real situation for a play in full production at most any theatre in the country. It may play amazingly on rehearsal cubes for 10 minutes, but remember, "If I don’t like what I’m seeing now, there will be something else in 10 minutes.".
Worth a Look
First off I should say that when I went to do the "worth a look" stories this week I came up with a list of 15, so you may want to check out the Greenpage proper. Failing that:
Here are a few posts from last week's Greenpage that might be worth your time:
Reality shows may put crews too close to cutting edge
latimes.com: Monica Martino had filmed tornadoes in the Midwest, ship collisions in the Antarctic and crab fishermen in Alaska's Bering Sea. But those experiences didn't prepare her for a terrifying nighttime boat ride in the Amazon jungle. In February, the 41-year-old co-executive producer was thrown into a murky river after getting footage for "Bamazon," a series for the History cable channel about out-of-work Alabama construction workers mining for gold in the rain forest of Guyana.
Utah School Stops Musical Because of 'Sexually Suggestive' Elvis Songs
www.huffingtonpost.com: A parent who was "All Shook Up" about Elvis Presley songs in a high-school drama prompted educators to cancel the musical, deeming it too sexual. But the decision was reversed Thursday by administrators at the high school south of Salt Lake City. The administrators at Herriman High School received permission from the copyright owners of "All Shook Up" to edit some of Presley's songs and make scene changes in the American jukebox musical that borrows from William Shakespeare.
Aubrey Ireland, College Student, Wins Restraining Order Against Helicopter Parents
www.huffingtonpost.com: Sometimes parents just don't know when to let go, but it's rare when a judge needs to intervene. That was the case for Aubrey Ireland, a 21-year-old music theater major at College-Conservatory of Music at the University of Cincinnati. She convinced a judge to grant her a restraining order against her parents, David and Julie Ireland.
We are in the middle of an arts reformation!
The Pink Line Project: A call to action from arts advocate and revolutionary Ben Cameron, who says we are in the middle of an arts reformation not unlike the religious reformation. Both fueled by technological advances, both redistribute culture, both take away the intermediary between man and the divine experience. Pay attention!
Why we’re not done talking about diversity.
mingzhuhii.net: I don’t want to be the annoying non-white woman who goes on about the need for more interrogation around the diversity of (and in) our arts practices and structures. I’m uncomfortable enough with culturally specific labels as it is, and worse with impatient stereotypes driven by some kind of fear-induced backlash against political correctness. Especially in an industry (or series of industries that sit alongside each other) that is/are supposed to be liberal, open-minded, progressive.
Sunday, January 27, 2013
NFTRW Weekly Podcast
This week's effort:
This week's stories:
- Drexel Introduces Kiosk that Dispenses MacBooks
- Table Saw Safety: Why the British Think We're Crazy
- 6 Ways to Focus Without Taking Adderall
- This Mind-Boggling Installation Breaks The Laws Of Physics--Or Does It?
- 5 Things I Learned About Australian Theater
- The Staging of Ralph Ellison's 'Invisible Man'
- Why most "work made for hire" agreements in theatre don't work.
- Les Mis Film Used DPA 4071 Lavalier Mics to Capture Audio
- Opera About Walt Disney Refused Permission To Use Disney Images
- A Way Without Words: Mummenschanz Mimes Celebrate 40
This week's participants are: Taylor, Chris, Cat, Dale, Margo, and Lauren.
I Don't Believe You
I should probably do two posts at some point to get a day ahead, and then when I miss the deadline it will be less of a technicality.
Today I had interviews for the School of Drama. I can't remember how many times I've done this. There are probably as many as a dozen opportunities per year, maybe I do half of them, so in the neighborhood of 60 times? 4-5 candidates an outing, sometimes more, so somewhere in the neighborhood of 300 candidates? Must have been more than that actually. I used to be at the interviews more in my early years.
We have this form people have to fill out before they get their session. It has a place where we attach a picture, and we will append their resume, if they remember to bring it.
BRIEF TANGENT: WHEN INTERVIEWING FOR A PROFESSIONAL SCHOOL BRING A RESUME!
So there's a picture and maybe their resume and the bottom half is for our notes: who was there, anything of particular interest, and out rating of the candidate against a bunch of standards we've come up with over the years. I don't have one in front of me, but the list sounds something like: resume, portfolio, presence, presentation, academics, ideas, expression, maturity, and tenacity. They all mean roughly what you think they would.
The top half of the form is to be filled out by the candidate and includes address and other contact information, a space where you can write anything you like, and then prompts for GPA, Class Rank, and SAT/ACT scores, along with any AP scores.
I interviewed for college in... 1985 maybe, that's like 150 years ago, right? If someone today walked up to me totally out of context and asked me what my SAT score was I could tell them. In point of fact I could come up with SAT, ACT, and class rank. I don't off the top of my head remember my GPA, but lets be fair, it was 150 years ago and I am not currently applying for colleges.
Which is all a very long winded way of saying that if when you fill out the form and decide to leave the test score blank, and then when we follow up in the meeting and ask "Did you take this test? What was your score?" and you decide to answer: "I don't remember." Well, you just sound foolish, and pretty much everyone in the room assumes you are lying.
Based on the impact that exchange has on the interview process I'd have to say that your score would have to be PRETTY BAD for this to be a net positive effect. Truth be told, the folks at your interview weigh the test score lower than the people not at your interview. You HAD to tell those other folks, so it's already hurting your chances as much as it can, you can actually only HELP yourself by giving us the score at the interview, regardless of how bad it is.
If you have a lousy interview and a lousy score - you had a lousy interview anyway so it didn't really come into play. If you had a good interview and a lousy score, we can ask what you think happened with the score and possibly weigh your response in how we lobby our own and the university admissions discussions. If you have a lousy interview and hide a bad score, the hiding will only amplify our other judgements. And if you have an otherwise good interview and hide a bad score we'll be wondering what it was you were hiding and how hiding that fact reflects on our assessment of your maturity. Also, when it comes back from admissions that you had a bad score, and it will, we will be caught unaware, unable to place the piece of information in context, and unready to form a case in your favor.
So please, if you are going to college interviews anytime soon, be conversant about your GPA, Class Rank, SAT/ACT, and AP scores. If you think you'll be nervous and will blank on the spot, take a moment and jot the relevant information down on an index card or a copy of your resume (you know, the resume you will remember to bring) so that you have it right in front of you when you need it. That way, even if the score isn't what you would hope it to be you will come off as prepared and organized rather than as being evasive.
