27 June 2007

Flushing May's pipes

I don't think all of what's clogging these pipes'll be drained tonight, but I figger I'll at least get the robot head project accounted for, somewhat. I've spent a long time tonight sorting and tweaking photos, so I'll get 'em up here, even if I don't find the energy to report the details.

That's how the heads turned out, up top. The photo of me, top right, and Eddy Demon, bottom left, were taken by Scott Beale/Laughing Squid. All the other photos in this post are by Deb. There're only a couple of James, bottom right, in his robot head, because at both gigs he took it off before the first song was through. Here's the other photo:
He had trouble seeing out of it. This is actually the second iteration of his. I made a new one after the 12 Galaxies gig, with a bigger mouth hole to look out from, and better ventilation up top. But the adjustments weren't enough to suit him on either count. Of course, he was the only one of us who didn't have a hand in the construction or decoration of our robot heads: he was much more into wearing his cowboy hat and real live genuine rodeo shirt! But I don't wanna be snippy -- it looked alright. And we all had fun. Next post, I'll cover the SFMOMA newsletter calendar page project, and the Malenbrau label, just to make it seem like I've been doing something.

15 May 2007

Robot Heads

Alright, so this is how this is gonna go: I'll take a couple months off, thinking about writing this 'n' that, getting ideas for different directions in which to take the blogging endeavor, forgetting most of the details about anything creative I've done, and then I'll make a half-assed effort to document it all one night when I have a few hours home alone. Agreed? So, it's end of June. At least I won't have gone an entire calendar month without posting. I wrote the following sometime mid-May (apparently the 15th -- I didn't realize it would get published with the original draft date up top -- now I have to add another post before June is through!), already moaning about how unlikely I am to stay on top of this blog. However, I didn't have photos to post, so I let it go fallow. But nevermind -- enjoy some old news!:

Okay, right off the bat (right off the blat?) I can see the two main problems this blog will present. First, of course, is the challenge to do something creative every week (or so); second, and perhaps more formidable, is the challenge to document it and report it here... but enough whining. Get bizzow!

The past week's been a hectic one. We had the last three nights of The Good Doctor's run, with the wrap party Saturday night, then a Total Annihilation gig on Sunday afternoon at 12 Galaxies, for the Mission Creek Music Fest. TA has another gig coming up this Saturday morning at the MakerFaire, at the San Mateo Fairgrounds. I think we got that gig through Jesse's connections with the BoingBoing crowd, who overlap with the Make magazine crowd, who are behind the fair. All of which leads me to the past week's creative project: cardboard robot helmets for us to wear at the MakerFaire show.

I followed a BoingBoing link to a Scopitone by Les 5 Gentlemen, "Cara-Lin". It warranted a link, I guess, due to what was described as the "Stendhal syndrome-like" dancing of the nightclub crowd in the video. The song wasn't all that interesting, but it did rock (actually, watching it again now, it's got some pretty interesting playing on it), and the atmosphere of the club reminded me of the video for The New Pornographers' "The Laws Have Changed", a fave of mine (which, watching again now to research the link, is a fucking blast). Also, the whole Scopitone phenomenon was kinda intriguing. Apparently these things were like video jukeboxes back in the '60s. So, I flipped through a few of the videos on the site's archive, looking for other scorchers and came across The Tornados' "Robot". Now, here again, the song ain't all that, but the video is absolutely goofy. The guys in the band are milling about in the woods, with robot helmets on, playing their instruments and making out with some girls. Then they take the helmets off, presumably to make out more efficiently -- it turns out they're just regular guys! -- and shortly thereafter, the cops come wandering by and chase them all off with some canine back-up. So, anyway, the robot head thing was intriguing, what with TA's robotic MySpace tag line from Mr. Demon's "Rock and Roll on a Friday" lyrics, and the robotic headline from TA's own BoingBoing link last year. I showed the boys the Scopitone, got them into the idea, and tried to convince Eddy to start making some helmets. He, however, insisted he didn't know how, so I stepped in to fashion them myself. Here's some pictures. I gave Eddy the first two I made, for Pete and himself, and unfortunately forgot to photograph them in their raw un-foiled state. Then, of course I forgot to photograph any of them in their earliest stages. Here's some preliminary sketches...

...And that's as far as that post got. I didn't have the preliminary sketches photographed yet, so nothing happened 'til today. Now, I've got photos of the MakerFaire gig, and plenty more to talk about, but it's getting late. I'll post this and address the rest later, so I can jam up my post count!


03 May 2007

Good Doctor

The play we've been working on at ACSF since the beginning of the year opens tonight. We had a dress rehearsal run through last night, open to the public. Most of the audience were friends of mine who came as part of Kevin's 26th birthday celebration. I was happy to have them there. What I didn't expect was that they'd be a very quiet crowd. They insisted they enjoyed the show, were very impressed, etc., but I think they were too intimidated by the unusual surroundings (small theater, amateur acting?) to express their reactions audibly. They were excessively polite, to the point that the cast was bewildered by their silence. We all figure the people who pay full price for the main show will probably be a little more savvy about audience response.

Anyway, I'm thrilled to be at a point where this whole process is almost through. It's a bit of a rush for me to have started this blog thing while the play is going on, because I literally have no spare time for this nonsense. But just to keep some creative endeavors in evidence, here's a snapshot, above left, of the flyer I laid out for the show. With minor changes, we arranged it in a two sided 4x6 postcard and printed up a few to pass out. I'm a little curious about copyright concerning this. I didn't draw the image of the woman and the bear. It's from a poster for a magazine (I think) called Berliner Secession, from April 1907. The artist is anonymous, and the magazine, I would guess, is defunct (I haven't researched), but I found the image in a book of graphic design from that era. So, by copying the image from that book, am I violating their publisher's copyright? Also, the woman was originally holding a palate with paintbrushes. I erased that, and did a Google image search for "theater masks", which yielded a black and white jpeg of masks similar to those you see her holding here. I cleaned them up a little, altered some details, much like I did for the lady and the bear; but beyond that, they're just ripped off the web and pasted. Oh, and then I went back looking for the source, but a new Google image search didn't turn up these particular masks.

I'm not making any money on this (the flyer, or the play), and it was a useful learning tool for Photoshop, which I'm only recently becoming familiar with.

Oh, and I picked the image because -- besides looking good -- it featured a woman and a bear. Shelley inserted a scene into the play, that in itself is a smaller one-act play, by Chekhov himself, called, alternatively, The Bear, or The Boor (which brings up it's own copyright issues -- she paid for the rights to perform The Good Doctor, but we've cut a number of scenes and added this one, without expressed written consent. What's it matter?). Shelley liked the idea of using the bear for the flyer. Unfortunately, in the program, and in the lines of the scene, for this production, the character is referred to only as the Boor. So, there's really no connection. Incidentally, what's a boor? How is it different from a bore, or a boar, as those are used to describe certain people? Is there any connection to the Boers? Were they boorish, or boarish, or boring?

01 May 2007


I just wanted to add that somewhere recently, I think probably in an interview with some young actor (if I can figure out where, and it's online, I'll post a link), I heard someone enthusing about just wanting to work with people who love what they're doing, who are passionate about what they're doing. I felt pretty indicted by it, 'cuz, well, not only would I enjoy loving what I'm doing, but how much joy am I detracting from everyone's work experience around me? The guys who work with me at the shop, the cast in this play, the boys in the band, and not least, the woman I'm planning to marry -- finding joy in what I'm up to is a social responsibility!

30 April 2007

Inaugural Post

Every step of this process is straining against the ever growing conviction that it'll never work, it's just gonna be a big stress ball, I'm only gonna learn how truly I suck, I'll end up talking myself into some kind of obligation I'll soon sorely regret, and I'm bound to do something that'll upset a friend at some point. But, carrying on!...

This was borne of a conversation yesterday with Deb that covered a lot of territory. It started, maybe, because I'd been awake much of the night trying to work out the particulars of an "e-mail chain game" I imagined, called Re:anonymizer/de-anonymizer, that was supposed to somehow reveal that personal observations of friends are re-shaped in the public sphere--reveal, in other words, the obvious--or was supposed to accumulate interesting stories about the participants. I'm not sure what it was supposed to do, but in trying to describe it aloud to Deb once she woke up, it quickly lost the appeal it'd had with the lights out. Anyway, I said I'd been watching SNL and MadTV the night before, and was noticing in the commercial ads between segments how many goofy skits there were. It struck me that that's a good way to get into the comedy writing business, by devising goofy skits for ads and marketing them to the ad agencies. After a while, I had to remind myself that I wasn't trying to get in to the comedy writing business. But talking about it led to talking about a couple of Jesse's TSOYA shows I'd listened to recently; one, interviewing Roz Chast and Bill Hader, described their processes for generating a half-dozen or so comics every week
, in Roz's case, for the New Yorker, and skits, in Bill's case, for SNL; and the other, with Jonathan Coulton, related some of his experiences with his Thing-a-Week project, wherein he committed himself to writing a song every week and posting it on his website.

And so, here we are. By the end of that conversation, I'd decided to try to post something on a blog every week (or so?), that manifests some sort of creative expression. Something more than just a journal entry, although I s'pose the regular journalling is probably a good base for generating something more creative. Anyway, I don't know what format it'll be in from time to time. I imagine I'll be figuring out how to post a lot of photographs of stuff I'm doing. I imagine, too, that I'll be filling some weeks in with stuff I've already done in the past. Wait... that sounds like a cop-out. Okay, not in the past, but stuff I'm working on now... or, say, within the past month -- so at the start, here, I can clear the vaults of things I've been recently up to, while I get myself up to speed. Or, I can post old stuff, but it doesn't absolve my responsibility for up-to-date creativity.

The point here, is that I've got a lot of creative outlets in my life, and a fair-sized dollop of creative talent, but I don't feel (a) like I'm using it nearly as much, or in the way that might be best suited to me; and (b) (probably synonymous with (a)) like I'm enjoying the creative process even a fraction as much as I'd like to. This is where all the growing convictions I mentioned in the first sentence come in. See, I own a sign shop that only makes hand-painted, hand-crafted signs, a real anomaly in the current urban landscape. I got involved with it eight years ago, when I resolved to get myself into a "creative work ethic", wherein I was using creative energy on a daily basis. And, a couple years back, I helped an eight-year-old friend form a band, to pursue his dreams of rock'n'roll superstardom. He writes all the songs, and even though he's eleven now, he's still bringing back warped missives from whatever planet his brain resides on. Oh, and I go to an acting class, have done for two years now. We're putting on a play starting this week; a two week run of The Good Doctor, a Neil Simon play based on Chekhov stories. And an old band I was in, in the '90s, is coming out with a 'retrospective' CD/DVD package, for which I'm designing the packaging. And SFMOMA has asked me to design the calendar page for an upcoming newsletter.

So, there's a lot to do, right? A lot of ways to be all arty. I don't know why I'm finding it so hard to enjoy any of it. In fact, I can go down the list and itemize why I find each venture baleful. I apparently have an 'attitude problem'. Anyway, I just want to shake this shit up, and re-jigger how I'm looking at it, so here goes. I don't particularly want to add more responsibility to the plate, but more to organize what I'm up to in a manageable fashion, maybe. I'm not sure what I'm doing here, really. But I sure as hell can't spend hours and days composing long-ass blog entries like this. Consider yourself introduced. I've got to quit this and spend some time focussing on characterization for my roles in the play. It's opening in 2 nights, and I'm way behind the ball!