Unstoppable David Clark has retained me to edit his longest (I think) play. It’s like Heaven, except there are some assholes in Heaven, but it’s cool, I’ve got a gun.
Category: Roommates
I saw the Neo-Futurists doing their show Too Much Light Makes The Baby Go Blind last Saturday night, courtesy of Unstoppable David Clark. I am going to see them again next weekend, at the 2:30 matinee on either Saturday or Sunday. Tickets are $25-$28 and you, you personally, had damn well better come with me. We can get a 10% discount if we scrape together ten people.
The Neo-Futurists are fucking amazing.
You can find all this out by going to their website, but because other humans are apparently lazy about clicking, here’s what happens: there are five performers and thirty (original) plays. They do, or try to do, all thirty plays in sixty minutes. They’re microplays. You understand why I am smitten.
The thirty plays may happen in any order, because they’re numbered and the troupe will do whatever number they hear the audience yell out as soon as the previous play is over. They also swap out 1d6 plays every night and replace them from a larger pool, so by this Saturday it might be a completely different show from what I saw.
As if this wasn’t enough, there is a seven-item checklist that I personally keep for determining whether or not any given show qualifies as performance art. The list is as follows:
- A person under a black cloth hood doing something ridiculous
- Giant diapers
- Performers dancing in the aisles and trying to get audience members to dance too
- Large pictures of female genitalia
- People eating money
- A man rubbing his nipples with an expression of fiendish glee
- The throwing of raw meat
And I shit you not, the version of the show I saw included six of those seven items. And it worked, because they were completely self-aware and loved it and laughed at themselves. They made metahumor work on stage. This is a feat akin to picking up litter with the pointy part of the Chrysler Building, and I’d only previously seen it done by the pre-Intel Blue Man Group.
I am completely serious about you coming with me to the show this weekend. Call or email me if you want me to add you to the possible-group roster, and I’ll tell you by Wednesday whether we have enough people. If the show sells out they’ll buy us pizza. I’m serious about that too.
Ian, I wish you could have been there. David Flora, the Neo-Futurists are from Chicago and they do this every week up there, you bastard, why haven’t you seen it yet?
I made myself wait two days to write this up because I didn’t want to rave and gibber and then be embarrassed when the high wore off. I’m raving and gibbering anyway. If you’re in Louisville, you need to come see the show.
David Flora VERSUS the accordion! I want to see a human trying to play the background part that starts about ten seconds before the end. I imagine him or her sweating, off-kilter, arms flapping as if about to be pushed out of a nest.
Saved from an LJ comment feed, because Will asked. I don’t think I’ve ever explained Movie Pong here before.
Movie Pong!
In Movie Pong, which is normally played in groups of three or more, one human names a movie. The human to his or her left names an actor who appeared in that movie, and the next human along names a different movie in which that actor appeared, and the next a different actor who was in the second movie, et cetera. (You can also start with an actor, it’s just simpler to explain this way.) It’s better to play with odd numbers of humans, so that each player has to name both actors and movies.
If you can’t name a movie or actor when you’re up, you can challenge the person who went before you. If he or she can’t name one either, you win and he or she gets a strike; if he or she can, you get a strike. Three strikes you’re out.
If you play Movie Pong with DC, you will lose, but you might learn something. I suspect that Scott is the same way.
Using IMDB is cheating, but permissible for resolving disputes. Using the Oracle of Bacon is always illegal.
A variation I much prefer is Team Movie Pong, in which a group of humans work collectively to try and make a Movie Pong chain from one actor to another. It’s usually easy to do in seven links (Actor 1, movie, actor, movie, actor, movie, actor, movie, Actor 2). The challenge is considered won if the group can do it in five. Doing it in three is considered a mighty feat. Obviously, the more disparate the actors, the grander the accomplishment.
Not Katrinablogging
“The music on the tape loops and looped. It was going round for a second time. We sat and listened to it. We’ll be sitting and listening to it for a while longer.”
Everybody needs to buy Magic for Beginners right now and read it because I need a discussion group to figure out what she is doing with tense, dammit. Or you can borrow my copy. You can’t borrow my copy! I’m reading the title novella to Maria and I have to read all the stories in it again anyway.
At its worst (“The Cannon”) the book descends into playful postmodern nonsense, but at its best it’s glorious. It may be less glorious to people who don’t share my borderline ADD.
The story I quoted above (“Lull”) is kind of about time travel, so maybe the tense ambiguity is tied to that, but it also shows up in at least one other story (“Catskin”) which is a fairy tale and not about time travel at all. But there are two distinct stories about zombies.
I need you to read this book so we can talk about it!
Something not to be cynical about
Miscellétudes: David Flora making music on the interweb! It was Lisa’s idea to make him do a weekly one-minute composition, but I get to host him for it.
I think this is frickin’ great!
Its name is Weakness. Its playlist is Fear Of The New.
This is the entry where I gush about my mp3 player! Pretend it’s 2002.
My messenger bag is considerably lighter now that I’m not carrying my Discman and fifty CDs in it all the time, and I never have to try to hold three things while standing up again. That’s awesome! I sneakily got a refurbished Shuffle directly from Apple, so I got the one-gig version for the 512 price, and it’s still got a year warranty. That is also awesome! I get to carry the Magic Future Perfect* Radio Mix Tape From Heaven around in my pocket and it makes me happy.
It doesn’t introduce me to new music like the radio and mix tapes are supposed to do (remember when the radio introduced you to new music? Ha ha!), but that’s what I have Lisa and Will and Maria and Ken for. Ken, move back already, dammit.
The audio quality on the Shuffle is really excellent–I’ve actually noticed instruments in the midrange I never heard before, and there are none of the audible compression artifacts I used to get with my mp3-CD player. The one thing it doesn’t have is a bass boost, which is crippling. I am a little bit addicted to my bass boost. I am addicted enough that tonight I purchased paraphernalia with which to enjoy my dependency. Having an equalizer the size of a pack of cigarettes really destroys the point of having a music player the size of a stick of gum, but man, I was getting the dee tees. I’ll probably bitch later about how it works out.
Before I knew the Koss equalizer existed, I was actually considering looking for some converters and a battery-operated guitar effects pedal that would let me change the bass, and just carrying that around instead. Then I thought “ah, but that would strip the signal to mono.” Then I thought “and would be completely insane.“
I was annoyed at first that I had to partition the areas for audio storage and file storage separately, but I fit every song I wanted in less than the 800 megs I’d reserved. There is a remedy, as it turns out, but honestly I’m only using it to listen to the second good duet in the history of pop over and over again.
(The first, and previously only, was “Under Pressure.” Bowie and Queen.)
* A grammar joke!
Because I don’t post lyrics at the end anymore
I wish I felt more authentic about liking Ted Leo and the Pharmacists. Basically the whole interweb told me they were good, then Maria told me I’d like them, then Ian played me the CD, and everyone was right. It was like being spoonfed. I wish I’d never heard of them until I heard them. I wish I’d walked in halfway through their set opening for somebody else and they’d started “Me and Mia,” and there’d be sweat spraying off me, pain in my ears, the way I used to dance before I worried about my spine.
Wednesday night, in the process of moving, I applied 360 foot-pounds of torque to my upside-down foot and am now on crutches. Crutches suck. I knew something like this would happen eventually; I’m just glad it happened to me.
I’m pretty sure it’s a sprain, and it already feels a lot better. It’d be nice to get it x-rayed to make sure it’s not broken, but my health insurance doesn’t kick in for another 68 days. Thanks, guys!
Maria has been taking very good care of me, and last night, Lisa and Scott picked us up and brought us to their apartment and fed us poached salmon and showed us funny DVDs and took us home. All this when Lisa was sick herself! It is impossible to have friends as good as Lisa and Scott.