Pixelation for the Pixilated

I was checking out some of the fabulousities on ModFab, one of the links I tried was for the blog Bibi's Box. Halfway down the page was this video:

The video is part of a series created by the remarkable Swiss artist Guillaume Reymond and there are more videos and documentation of his work on his website. Be warned though: the home page is in French only but the links I tried led to pages that are in French and English.

Modern Fabulousity: In The Land Of The Little People: Tony Kushner

I saw Homebody/Kabul when it was at BAM a few years ago. I loved what it had to say and I thought Act I (Homebody) was brilliant (and brilliantly performed by Linda Emond), but the rest of the production left me cold: it was interesting intellectually but not very entertaining. My friend ModFab has found video of a new production that might have made Act II work better for me! The actors in the video are little wooden (and they speak even more woodenly), but the concept is first rate!

Modern Fabulousity: In The Land Of The Little People: Tony Kushner

The Know-Nothings Are Here Again...

If you don't already know about it, you must go visit snopes.com, my FAVORITE debunker for all the knee-jerk forwarded (and alway inaccurate) e-mail diatribes I get from friends and family. Most of what people send me, snopes would characterize as glurge: they are supposed to be spiritually uplifting but are usually intellectually barren pleas to forward this to a bunch of people (how this is supposed to benefit anyone at all I have no idea). Occasionally, I'll get something that involves a get-rich-quick-scheme or a 'news' story that would be of interest to 'all Americans' (read: middle class white people who are not uncomfortable saying 'they' to refer to anyone who is not middle class and white).  

I don't know why these people have yet to realize that I'm a LIBERAL and I don't agree with them—at all!

So this evening, I read something on the snopes RSS feed that really irked me. I won't go into great detail here, because you can read it for yourself. Suffice it to say, the gist of the e-mail is that illegal immigrants are getting rich by receiving all sorts of financial aid for college. Of course, I've gotten similar e-mails in the past—too many of my fellow Texans feel obliged to share these these screeds on immigration policy with me periodically. I think what compelled me to write about this particular one is that every single piece of information in the e-mail is WRONG! Occasionally in these e-mails, there's a grain of truth somewhere or a general distortion of actual facts: this one is lies from beginning to end. I can understand why some people have problems with illegal immigration: I don't agree with most of their positions on it, but I sort of understand it. But how can you live with yourself if you have to use fiction to 'prove your case'? 

The title of this post refers to a political party in the early 19th century, actually called the American Party. I say they're here again but, really, don't we all believe they never really went away...?

Pot-O-Mat

According to the BBC, California is going to allow vending machines to dispense medical marijuana. You've got to have a prescription, of course, and it's not going to be like buying cigarettes in days gone by (although wouldn't that be groovy....?), but it's remarkable, nonetheless. Here's blorge.com's take on the story.

I was out in L.A. last fall. All of my transplanted NYC friends told me that getting a 'prescription' is pretty easy, and there are lots of places to legally fill it. So I'm not really sure how or even if this will change anything at all there. Maybe it's just another small step toward giving the world over to the robots—damn you, Karl Capek!

Pandora's Box

I've found something that's almost as addictive as Facebook: Pandora. Okay, this is WAY not news to most people and I did already know about the site. But my friend Nomi and I were talking about classical music yesterday and how online classical radio sucks (how many times do I have to listen to the Greatest Hits of the 18th Century? And in what twisted universe is Enya or Celtic Woman classical?) Nomi reminded me about Pandora and how you can train it to play whatever music you'd like (and sometimes even more important, train it NOT to play music you don't like).

So this morning I set up a classical station and by and large it did great—a few times I had to tell it to knock off the opera stuff (at least not while I'm trying to read the paper, please!) but everything else I really liked. My only complaint was that I typed in John Adams' name and it came back "WHO?"

Now I just have to resist the temptation to comment on every good song that comes up... and resist adding more artists every time a song comes on that reminds me of another artist that I really like... and resist making lots of different stations so I can have one that's classic rock but not just Floyd/Skynard/Zep (and not just the songs that were overplayed long before they became classic rock—seriously, does anyone need to hear "Stairway to Heaven" again?)... oh man, I could have a different station for every day of the week if not every day of the year...

Book 'Im, Dan-o!

So they've arrested Jérôme Kerviel in France. Will we find out how this enormous debacle happened? I dunno... I'm skeptical. I think he's going to be the Lee Harvey Oswald of high finance crime: whether or not you believe one moderately intelligent but unimpressive schmo could pull off a swindle this big will probably say as much about you as anything else. My opinion: the very fact that no one paid any attention to this guy at all is how he could do it—you trust him because you can't imagine any reason not trust him. And he's doing it all a little bit at a time so he doesn't realize what kind of deep water he's waded into and neither does anyone else. 

But then again, it could be a vast conspiracy.... 

French "Vanilla"

I read this story yesterday in the BBC and today the NY Times is reporting it: a junior trader at Société Générale (impressed by all those accents graves—thank god for a Mac!) in France lost $7.2 BILLION... and they're saying no one knew he was even doing it! In reading the Times version of the story, I kept thinking of what the neighbors always say about serial killers: "He was kind of a loner. Shy, quiet, a good neighbor... always kept his lawn neat. We never suspected anything." And to top it all off, it doesn't look like this guy gained financially from his crime (clearly he was getting something out of it, otherwise why do it?).

It also makes me think of all the movies where there's some master villain controlling the world (think every James Bond film ever), or all the conspiracies you hear about all the time. Personally, I think the world is more like the movie Brazil than anything else: some insignificant incident occurs that throws the entire apparatus of government to into a tailspin. It's not one of the Grande Ecole-educated Masters of the Universe who potentially bring about the destruction of one of the world's most powerful banks; it's some schmuck working in a low-level position from a regular college in southeast France.

The meek shall inherit the earth... but what do they want with it?

I Remember You in Paris...

A Gal a Day is not a porn site (sorry, boys). I toyed briefly with the idea of posting a picture of a different woman every day--like Margaret Sanger or Harriet Tubman or someone not famous perhaps but important to me--but that seems way too literal (and way too much work). I chose the name because (a) I really like the Marx Brothers and (b) I like the twisting of language that that sort of humor employs. I'm not going to try to explain it, actually: I think the non-sequitur probably says more on its own than I could impart.

One thing you can count on is that I have to go see a bunch of performances here in NYC and occasionally, I'm going to write about them. For instance: last night, Catherine and I saw our friends Jim Bauer and Meghan McGeary in The Weimarband at Joe's Pub. We'd seen them before, of course, but they hadn't performed their music from The Blue Flower with the entire band in a couple of years now. They gave a really great show, as always, and it was so great to hear Jim's music performed live again! If you haven't heard them, I urge you to check out the album on iTunes or Yahoo music. And if you're in NYC and you missed them last night, you've still got a chance to hear the music: Prospect Theater is mounting a production of the completed Blue Flower February 2 through March 2 at the West End Theater. I haven't seen the play since it was in workshops at The ASCAP Musical Theater Workshop a few years ago, but I'm looking forward to seeing where Jim and his wife, Ruth, who created the visual elements of the piece--that's one of her images from the show above--have taken it.

The Undocumented Life?

A Los Angeles-based friend of ours has become a sort of amateur archivist recently, with a particular focus on the history of Off-Off Broadway. So he's naturally very interested in any photos that people have--not only from those early productions, but also of any contemporary revivals, and of the artists from the period as they are today. Every time there's a new production or some reunion event or other, I usually find out about it first when I get an e-mail from him requesting photos, offering to pay for a disposable camera and developing costs (I use a digital camera, of course, so this is unnecessary, and, to be fair, he also asks other friends on his e-mail list, not just me). 

As someone who also enjoys history, I both understand and applaud his hobby and, whenever I can, I help out. However, my wife, Catherine, and I often joke (semi-seriously) whenever we receive another e-mail, "Because, you know: the undocumented life is not worth living..."

And here I am, starting a blog... Because, you know: ...

I don't yet know what I'll document. Or for how long (stick-to-it-a-tive-ness is not my strong suit). I mostly read the New York Times, snopes.com, the Straight Dope and the BBC world news online (yes, I'm an anglophile but at least I don't spell color or humor with a 'u' ... at least, not since the 7th grade...); perhaps something from one of those sources will find it's way here. I hope there's more news/information here than diary. We shall see...