Too Cruel!

Those Battlestar Galactica writers...
A Three Part "to be continued"?!  Boy am I glad I'm not watching this with week long breaks between episodes.  How will Galactica get out of this mess?  Cliff-hangers drive me nuts.

Less Serene Today

A bit more painting.  Basically, there's no end to doing the fiddly stuff on a set - eventually you just stop because the audience comes filing in...  Today there was company and chat (gossip? never!) and a more bustling feeling as Opening gets closer.  Broadway Our Way. Uptown Players.  Friday.  Be there.

But before putting on my I-live-under-a-bridge painting fashion wear, I wore my architect-uniform for a continuing ed. lunch seminar.  Exciting stuff.  Insulation.  Yep.  Not just any insulation either: polyisocyanurate.   (Good roast beef sandwich.)  The previous lunch seminar was on elevators and more exciting since elevator systems have changed since I used to read the textbook on the subject - years after school - on those nights when I had insomnia.

image courtesy of Clipart Graphics

The Zen of Painting

A good day yesterday.  Finish-painting my Broadway Our Way set, I had the Frank Lloyd Wright theater to myself.  Sure an air conditioning guy thumped in the basement and Uptown Players staff worked upstairs - now and then someone would wander through - but for hours, just me.  Empty theaters can feel creepy, but the Kalita Humphreys feels warm.  (Not in temperature, it's always freezing - what's the A/C guy doing?)  If this stage is haunted, it's by friendly ghosts.  Still, I ought to have felt lonely.  Just me.  No radio. Paint buckets.  Doing fiddly stuff with small brushes.  Instead it was...

Serene.

Serene doesn't happen much.  There's a rhythm to painting.  An absorption.  A relaxed concentration that leaves time for thought.   Another rare thing.

Paper Architecture

I just came across two fascinating websites on paper architecture - building models made just from paper, often only a single sheet.

image courtesy of Ingrid Siliakus

image courtesy of Jill Sylvia

Irony

Rereading that last post it strikes me - Minerva is a goddess of War.

Theater Interrupted...

Yesterday was Tech for Broadway Our Way (a fun show, I think).  Midway through, an actress stuck her head from stage left to announce, "They've got Bin Laden's body!"  Rehearsal continued.

Another non sequitur is how I heard of 9/11 - an overheard fragment of talk, then realizing that radio was being broadcast throughout the fabric store where I was shopping for a show, "...smoke rising from the Pentagon..."  Both times it took a while for the news to sink in, but this morning I feel a fierce  satisfaction.  Am a little ashamed of that satisfaction.

Imagine living such a life that thousands, millions, celebrate your violent death?

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The post I'd been intending to write (before this news) was a peaceful one about an almost-rainy afternoon in the lovely gardens of the Valley House Gallery.  Statues, mostly human figures of what looks like earthenware, dot the grounds and gaze at the pond, with a group of crouching figures, arms wrapped round their bodies, waiting stoically under a tree.  In the gallery is an exhibit of paintings by Henry Finkelstein.  Fantastic color!  My favorite was an interior in an expressionistic mustard-y yellow, showing a marble fireplace mantel with a bust of Minerva.  Gorgeous.

I'd been returning from a trip to WaterTower Theater to photograph my Lady set, happened to see the "garden party" sign, and stopped on a whim.  I should stop more often - it's a good gallery and there's something soul-restoring in those gardens.

photo courtesy of Valley House Gallery

Maybe the world's struggle is not really between governments and causes...  Maybe the basic conflict is between making and breaking - between the human impulses to tear down or to build up?  So fiercely satisfying to smash! So much quieter and more difficult to create art or a garden.  Thankless tasks, often. Yet, how can a sane person prefer death over life?

Strangest Industrial Injury...

Yet.

Yesterday I put in some serious spray-painting (turning those beads silver).  Six cans.  Now I wonder how graffiti artists do what they do...  Do they build up a callus on their spray-can fingers?  Because mine is weirdly pins-and-needles today.

image courtesy of UNSW Built Environment blog / Jessica Irons

Film Fest Time

127 Hours.  Hard to watch, but worth the discomfort.  An amazing film about what seems an unfilmable event - a climber trapped by a falling boulder that pins his right arm to the wall of a narrow stone canyon... just a crack in the earth.  Gotta be tough to film an action movie where the hero can't move!  Beautifully photographed.  And a brilliant job by James Franco, who was nominated for an Oscar (and I can't now believe he didn't win).  It reminded me a bit of Castaway, both being of the man-trapped-alone-with-big-problem genre.