A Past How-To on Set Building

 I happened across an old web page of mine, a How-To on set building aimed at beginning theater designers and builders: "Theater Set Questions Answered!".  You can check it out HERE on Hub Pages.

I'm starting to read a new (to me) book, Stage Designers in Early Twentieth-Century America, by Christin Essin.  More a history and cultural study than a visual essay, it's very interesting so far...

Other intriguing reading and watching lately: comedian Colin Jost's memoir A Very Punchable Face; David Sedaris's memoir Theft by Finding; essays/demonstrations/rants/performance art? YouTube videos by Karolina Z'ebrowska (for a funny version of a film costume design production meeting watch "Boobs"); and the vid essays of Jacob Geller.  I particularly recommend (to scenic design fans) "The Intimacy of Everday Objects," "Control, Anatomy, and the Legecy of the Haunted House," and also "Art Theft."  But, honestly, they're all great.

If you're missing production meetings, here below is a tiny taste.  (Honestly, I've always been a bit shocked by the blunt talk by costume designers... this is actually kinda... mild.)

Addendum:  How to document a dream - the resin diaramas of Thalasso hobbyer HERE.

Sigh

It's always when you're already busy that unexpected extra work lands on you.

Squidoo has been sold.  This is the on-line community where I've written a number of articles (including my Greatest-Hit "Theater Set Questions Answered," my Dear-Abby-ish answer to worried high school play designers everywhere). 

This means that I will have to reformat, rewrite, or abandon a lot of work.  Whatever I choose, the new owners, HubPages, can choose to drop any or all of it.

Sigh.

A polite sigh was not, mind you, my first reaction to this news. 

If this is having a rug pulled out from under me, it's a rug upon which I set a desk, a chair, bookcases (of course!) stuffed with books, assorted filing cabinets, a drafting board, a sofa, giant ornamental vases full of dried pampas grass, and maybe a stuffed grizzly bear. 

Grumpy as I feel... maybe the bear's not taxidermied just yet.

A collage from public domain sources, including Amedeo Simonetti's 

The Rug Merchant at Wikimedia Commons.  

In more cheerful news, among those books I'll have to virtually move (sigh? snarl?) is a recent read - Good Prose: The Art of Nonfiction, by  Tracy Kidder and Richard Todd, the author of House and his long-time editor and friend.  This is a book I'll need to return to the library... then buy my own copy of. 

Other books I've enjoyed lately?  I'm working my way through Greek Revival America by Roger G. Kennedy, a writer on architecture and related topics whom I've followed for years... since he first introduced me to my role-model, architect/pirate Barthelemy Lafon, in fact.  I enjoyed Lindsey Davis' Enemies at Home, the second novel in her new ancient-Roman-detective series.  Try her Silver Pigs as a starter.  I liked Terry Pratchett's latest Discworld novel Raising Steam.

I think I'll go read a nice calming book.