hiding · out · on · the · continent

So, I've signed up for NaNoWriMo again this year. I will probably be working on SATAN COP, even though I've already started it, and am unwilling to throw out such brilliant lines as "You just want my fingerprints on your faucet" and "Do you know what they do to people in prison? They make them do telemarketing!" I kind of doubt the 1000 or so words I've got now are going to push me over the edge. The thing that will probably trip me up is caring less about the murder than Bowery Havok's outfits. I have bought some books on how to write detective novels that will hopefully help me with that. Or maybe I'll change my mind at the last minute and do the lesbian gothic about expirimental music instead.

I do not really know if I agree with the aims of NaNoWriMo. I think I have a pretty good relationship with my inner editor. I have known people without inner editors, and the prospect of being like them is absolutely terrifying. But even though I've never gotten even half way there, in past years I've started some pretty good projects and made some pretty good friends. Hopefully that will happen again.

Delphine Seyrig looks even more like a vampire in Last Year at Marienbad than she does in Daughters of Darkness. And I mean that in the best possible way.

I went to see Diamanda Galas at the New Hazlett Theatre on the North Side. Pittsburgh seems to have been her only American date on the current tour (her next date is in Slovenia). She made a sound like grief and a sound like rage, a sound like a trapped animal and a sound that was half way between a detuned radio and a train going by in the distance, not the whistle or the chugga chugga but that high long lonely sound you can hear a mile away. She sang a bunch of Jacques Brel songs and I cried a little, though the only words I could make out were 'rien' and 'perdue'.

THE SEAGULL:

I was somewhat obsessed with The Seagull in Jr. High, though this was my first time seeing it performed. It is a play about art in general and literature and the theatre in particular, about being a writer and about what people who are not writers think that means. It is also a play about how no one is ever happy, regardless of whether they succeed or fail. Having not read the play for about fifteen years, I had given into the conventional wisdom that teenagers are idiots and suspected that I hadn't understood it; that the characters I found so tragic were actually ridiculous. But seeing it live I find that it is the same play that I remember: the satirical edge is evident but not so sharp as to rob the characters of sympathy; everyone is faintly ridiculous but it is their ridiculousness that makes them tragic.

As someone who rarely goes to the theatre I'm not sure how to judge this particular production, though I do think Masha was too sexy and Konstantin was not sexy enough. (Masha should be a somewhat gawkish goth girl, not a hot goth girl. It might just be me who thinks Konstantin is/should be really sexy. This how you got my attention in Jr. high. By being Russian and shooting yourself). I've always felt that Chekhov should be performed in very subtle, almost detached manner, but that probably says more about me and my preference for filmic styles of acting than it does about Chekhov. Konstantin's play within a play was hilarious, something that is not so obvious reading the play on it's own. The performance was staged at Pittsburgh Playwrights, which is somewhat odd as Chekov was obviously not from Pittsburgh. Also odd, Pittsburgh Playwrights is house in a few small rooms contained in a parking structure.

THE CONQUEROR WORM:

This was a dramatisation by some CMU kids of several poems and stories by Edgar Allen Poe, another writer I was obsessed with in Jr. High. Poe is also tragic and ridiculous, but in the opposite direction. The director started the performance with a warning that the piece contained sudden and prolonged instances of darkness. While I started out snickering at the over-literal interpretation of the line "the orchestra fitfully breathes" by the end I was genuinely moved. I am generally skeptical of expressing anything through dance or 'movement,' but I realised that dance is actually ideal for expressing the unnatural and uncanny, the otherworldly and the grotesque. My favourite segment was 'Ulalume' which was spoke-sung to an accompaniment of banjoes. The play was greatly enhanced by it's location; it was staged at the Allegheny Playhouse Childcare Center, a crumbling and atmospheric 100 year old Czech church, having gone through several incomplete and competing renovations.

Here is our first and last album, The Tower Inverted to listen to and download for free. If you want a hard copy let me know, and I will give you a CDR.

I used to think I hated holidays, but then I realized that what I actually hate is other people. Since I started spending holidays on my own, cooking myself ridiculous meals and drinking wine and listening to Motown, I've decided holidays are great.

Please come, with or without your gothic lolita and festive robot child. I will have sweatervests and cuddly octopi.

It is I, Barthor Martok, Hero of Leisure. Recently I was sent to a Futurological Congress as an ambasador, representing the glorious culture and peoples of the Republic of Nyesk.

( Read more... )