01 May 2012

Was I Naked? Did I Speak?


These are the two questions I immediately ask anyone who tells me they've dreamed of me. I've been asking them since college, though I can't remember exactly why I started. (In all probability, it had to do with someone once dreaming of me as a silent ninja [true story {I used to wear a lot of black}] and the other bit . . . because, you know: college.) At any rate, it's been quite a while since anyone other than Wife Megan has mentioned to me of a dream-me paying a visit, but last week someone did. And I was quite taken with the dream.

I'll leave the analysis to you, Dear Reader, both of the dream and of my particular affection for it. I will say this about that, though - I'm certainly in a place in my life wherein I am coming to appreciate a good plan.

Without further adoobie doobie do:

"You dominated a dream of mine last night. 
"I was holding a party in my apartment, although, as dreams often do, the apartment was larger and more elaborate and in fact looked nothing like where I now live.  Anyway, I was 'holding' it, but you had organized it.  And it was remarkable what you did.  There were teams of enthusiastic helpers and functionaries, none of whom I had seen before.  They all had specific jobs in rooms with specific purposes.  There was a dessert room overseen by a very beautiful French woman and her very handsome boyfriend who was not French, but only ever spoke French so I didn't get an idea of where he might have been from.  There was a beverage room with very jolly bald men in charge.  There were rooms upon rooms of buffets manned by unfamiliar actors, except that [NAMELESS DEAR KOOKY FRIEND] somehow snuck in amongst them.  The entire scheme was so elaborate that you had painted arrows and directions wittily worded onto the carpets with some kind of durable but removable spray paint.  Then behind all this in a small room with a window, you sat with sleeve garters and a humorously improvised visor, like from some Dickensian novel, with electronic gear in hand that communicated with your empire, and another one of those jolly bald men as your assistant. 
"The only thing the party seemed to have lacked were guests.  But maybe I woke up before it started. 
"Thanks for all your hard work. I hope you got some sleep in spite of it." 

30 April 2012

Where Is My Mind?

A couple of Saturdays back, our aerial silks teacher held her second student showcase. Wife Megan being in a maternal way, she was unable to perform, but she choreographed, and I was lucky enough to be subject to her whims (and thus, you have her to blame for my provocative costuming). Along with my scene partner Jeanne Barenholtz I enacted a Fight Club-inspired routine to the Pixies' angsty classic Where Is My Mind?. All photos compliments Seamus Maclennan.
A miasma of silky warm-up.

We were aiming for right-angled awkward, but this just looks flat-out weird.

Just don't ask about the fabric burns. For, like, at least another week more.

Don't worry - there's actually at least three layers of undies there.

This is all Jeanne.

This, less so.

I wasn't eating chocolate. That was a jellied smear of stage blood, until my sweat took over.

Our silks were not rigged that close, hence our bulging guns (OK: Jeanne's bulging guns).

23 April 2012

Guest Post @ Fighting Monkey Press

The first of two guest posts I'll be writing over at Pavarti Tyler's Fighting Monkey Press went up last Friday. If'n you haven't already, please hit up Pav's site to reward yourself for knowing someone who knows someone as awesome as she. My post is to do with religion, so you can visit to start and/or join a flame-war while you're at it! An excerpt, whetting your spiritual palate:



"...[I]t should come as small surprise that so many of us define ourselves by distinction and exclusion. It’s almost a self-explanatory notion – one reads the word 'distinction,' and the definition begs a synonym of identification. Yet they aren’t the same thing. My favorite color is blue, because my favorite color is not yellow. Even logically, that sentence doesn’t compute. The distinction is not the reason, nor the causation.

"Yet we hasten to describe and define our religion by what we don’t believe."

17 April 2012

Detecting that Marvelous Difference

What advice would you give Warner Brothers on getting their Justice League movie going?

"Call me. No, seriously, it's enormously difficult to take very disparate characters and make them work. And DC has a harder time of it than Marvel because their characters are from a bygone era where characters were bigger than we were. Marvel really cracked the code in terms of them being just like us. I think you need to use that as your base."



-Joss Whedon, director of The Avengers, speaking with Dark Horizons

11 April 2012

Gotham

A village in Nottinghamshire, a county in central England, 'Gotham' has been settled for millennia. In the medieval era, it became famed as a place settled by madmen, for, at least according to legend, the villagers feigned insanity in order to avoid being put to work building a royal road, which was then rerouted away from Gotham. Washington Irving borrowed this legend in a short story of 1807, calling New York 'Gotham'...
- Word Origin: 2012 Day-to-Day Calendar, Wednesday, April 11