Film Field Trip # 2 (or so)

True Grit -  Finally got to see this excellent western directed by the Coen Brothers.  I remember reading and liking the book long ago...  this film version captures its tough-minded quality.  Great performances all round.  Boy! I didn't even recognize Matt Damen until he spoke.  The girl was a pistol.  I loved the archaically proper diction of all the characters' speech.  It made me realize again how sloppily we all speak nowadays... can you imagine a double feature playing True Grit and, like, you know, the flic Clueless?

Film Festive!

It was Curmudgeon Night at the movies...


Despicable Me -  So much fun.  The viewer knows from the instant we see the cute little girls where this is headed... and that's much of the satisfaction.  Charmingly and imaginatively done (right down to super-villain toilet paper with a red V for Vector).  The final grace note is the minions' little competition during the credits. I laughed and laughed.

Ghost Town - Ricky Gervais as an unpleasant dentist who sees dead people.  Like Despicable Me, watching the film reach its expected ending is the fun of the thing. Nice to see Greg Kinnear and Tea Leoni.

Pizza is a traditional movie food - and it was tasty - but to fit the theme it should have been those big movie house dill pickles.

On Reading...

There is an on-going debate on whether the our increasingly plugged-in click-the-screen world is somehow changing our brains.  And whether, for instance, we as a species are losing the ability to read Big Books.  Here's a great comment on the question from an article by Jim Holt in the London Review of Books :

‘No one reads War and Peace,’ responds Clay Shirky, a digital-media scholar at New York University. ‘The reading public has increasingly decided that Tolstoy’s sacred work isn’t actually worth the time it takes to read it.’ (Woody Allen solved that problem by taking a speed-reading course and then reading War and Peace in one sitting. ‘It was about Russia,’ he said afterwards.) 

SNIPPET # 14

The latest excerpt from the "Design Methods" chapter of my set design book Alice Through the Proscineum.  (Why strain your eyes with this glow-y screen?  Buy a paperback at Lulu.com - it's more profitable, um,  restful!):

Start from Scratch -  Sometimes the problem you’re trying to solve isn’t the real problem.  It often isn’t the right problem.  (More of a concern in other types of design perhaps… I mean, there is going to be a show really, isn’t there?)  Naiveté helps: assume nothing, see clearly.  What is really going on?  As when Hewlett-Packard realized they weren’t really in the business of selling printers; the profits were in selling ink cartridges. 

Step Back -  Stop.  Look at the wall you are beating your head against.  Can you go round it instead?  Over it?  Under it?  Maybe blow it up?

Sleep on it -  Night can bring counsel.  Now and then, a problem that you fell asleep pondering will be solved by morning.  So take a quiet minute before starting the day to check for new-born ideas.  Dreams sometimes lead to something – though you sound like a dork if you admit it out loud.

Can’t Sleep? -  Fretting over stalled design can keep you awake, so practice putting work aside at bedtime.  A hot bath.  Chamomile tea.  Resist the idea that a true artist must live a bohemian life of too much booze and too little sleep.  Fun, yes, but counter-productive.  Monet advised artists to live like the bourgeoisie, with regular hours and excellent French food.  He 4.17 did okay work, by the way.


4.17 Oops.  It was Flaubert: “Be regular in your daily life like a bourgeois, so that you can be violent and original in your work.”  Virginia Woolf also advised dining well, but mainly stressed having a good income and a room of one’s own.

"Medals, Boris! Medals!"

(A favorite Woody Allen quote from Love and Death.)  There IS something a little grade-school-assembly about the idea of medals or trophies for artists, but who cares?


Harper Lee got a national arts medal for To Kill a Mockingbird!


One of great American novels.  Maybe THE Great American Novel.  (In my opinion it's a knock-down drag-out fight between Mockingbird and Huck Finn, with Steinbeck holding both authors' coats.)  To Kill a Mockingbird has been hugely important in dismantling Jim Crow and fighting race prejudice in our country and remains so today: a friend is painting a new a stage production of it as I type...  It's still read and loved.  One of my all-time most-loved books, Mockingbird had me at the word "teacakes" in the quote that follows:


"Maycomb was an old town, but it was a tired old town when I first knew it. In rainy weather the streets turned to red slop; grass grew on sidewalks, the courthouse sagged in the square. Somehow, it was hotter then: a black dog suffered on a summer's day; bony mules hitched to Hoover carts flicked flies in the sweltering shade of the live oaks on the square. Men's stiff collars wilted by nine in the morning. Ladies bathed before noon, after their three-o'clock naps, and by nightfall were like soft teacakes with frostings of sweat and sweet talcum."


That writer knows the South.  


Other winners I was thrilled to see?  Meryl Streep, James Taylor, and our local boy, Van Cliburn.

Incomparable Theater

Creditors:  I was lucky enough to see Broken Gear Project Theater's production of this August Strindberg play.  Easy to see what a delicate mechanism the play is... how quickly this love/hate triangle could slip into ranting or fossilize into one of those over-corseted classics where the back row audience snoozes.  Not here.  I never use the word "perfect" (it sounds so unlikely to be true), but I honestly can't think of a thing that could be improved.  Direction, sets, costumes, the sum of the parts including, most importantly, the wonderful performances... were just... right.

I admired the set and costumes.  The set was just a couple little bookend walls added to the jogs and corners of the existing space in what feels like an old garage.  There is a painted-over window and a cracked concrete floor.  All of this is simply painted over again in subtle shades of gray to suggest vertical boards that blur into a sea view - mostly a dark horizon line, pale water, lowering clouds, with the feeling of a Japanese ink brush painting.  Furniture is beautiful Victorian stuff, which either looks white-washed (and white upholstered) or gleams a little redly, like the actress's auburn hair.  Costumes take this delicate color game even farther, with gray, subtle shades of cream, palest green, hints of auburn, and in the gown, another green and a pale slate-y blue.  All nuance.

The play itself - which I'd never seen performed -  was a fascinating three-way duel of jealousy and mental-power games as written by a sort of evil Henry James (a contemporary).  All the characters were in their own ways, monsters.  This is going to sound fanciful, but it made me think of a delicate glass goblet, the kind made in Murano for Medicis and Borgias, filled with a white wine like crisp apples, all floral bouquet... and poisoned.

image borrowed from Rossana & Rossana 

Boeing Boeing:  A rollicking farce, set in the 1960s Paris about a man with three fiances, each one an air hostess - he just has to keep their schedules straight.  Could there be a greater contrast to Strindberg?  Mental whiplash!  Yet, you know, both plays are about men and women and love triangles/ rectangles/ pentangles (pentagons?).  I can't pretend to review Boeing, as I designed it, but I will say that directing and acting a farce are - in a utterly different way - just as difficult as in the most serious drama.  This farce is, I think, successfully accomplished and very funny.  As for the tech parts: the stewardess' uniforms are period correct in zippy colors and the set... well, when I read on page 2, "exit door # 7" I smacked my forehead.  Hard.  But amongst all those doors I did manage to sneak in a few playful views of Paris and some bright, '60s art.

Apples versus oranges?  At least those are both fruit - these two plays are poisoned apples versus orange shag carpeting.  Impossible to compare.  Except... maybe... both productions are souffles.

image borrowed from flikr

Designer's Day

One of the great, fun, satisfying things about a theater designer's life is that each day is different.

Last week was filled with painting and set dressing days.  With shopping days and driving days and lugging-stuff days.  Today turned into a talk-to-people day... though, as we talked, a certain amount of painting happened.  Quite a bit of painting, actually, on a friend's set, plus a little loaning out of models and drawings to another friend with a class that's learning about set design, and, tonight, seeing yet another friend's show.

Meanwhile, there are shows waiting on my board: waiting for this weekend's scribbles to turn (magically!) into neat construction drawings; or for a scattering of vague back-of-my-mind ideas to jell into a coordinated design. Tomorrow will be a drawing day.

Film Fest

Finally got to watch The Social Network.  A fascinating film that is (according to Wikipedia) 40% true.  A clever screenplay, I thought, and good performances, because the subject could have been rather dry - the legal wrestling over profits and credit for what boils down to the writing of a lot of lines of computer code?  Amazing that it could turn into a riveting movie.

Just as, I suppose, a king's stammer seems a slight foundation for another gripping film, The King's Speach.

Just goes to show that the success of a piece of art is not really about its subject so much as how that subject is handled.