Life in a Northern Virginia suburb of Washington, D.C. B.M.A.T.C., and Etruscan typewriter erasers. Blogged by David Gorsline.
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Well, there's still a lot of stuff in boxes to be unpacked, and not all the curtains have been hung, but I think that we can declare A Honey of an Anklet officially open.
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Time for a change. The new blog, A Honey of an Anklet, is in beta.
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I just kissed off a short theater project, one that was scribbled all over by misunderstandings and wrong expectations (some of them mine). Once again, I am so glad that I don't have to make a living at this.
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So quickly, I've become accustomed to right-clicking a C# variable name in Visual Studio to get to the Refactor>Rename... dialog box, that I wish I had the same feature in VS's XML editor so that I can change the names of elements.
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Too funny: world-class photographers take notes in an online forum. William Eggleston's tricycle:
This is just a snapshot. I would not even have considered showing this.
If you ware going to post pictures you need to make sure it is of
something unusual or with a personal vision. Otherwise you are going to
loose the interest of your audience.
(Thanks to kottke.org.)
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Saturday morning I'm reading Raymond Chandler's The Lady in the Lake on the Red Line headed north. I'm so gobsmacked by an image that I miss my stop and have to reverse my tracks at Bethesda. Marlowe is passing dollar bills to a bellhop in San Bernardino in exchange for some information:
I separated another dollar from my exhibit and it went into his pocket with a sound like caterpillars fighting.
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The lamest answers to Family Feud questions, ever.
Question: Name a musician who goes by one name.
#1 Answer: Madonna Worst Answer: Reba McIntyre (Thanks to The Morning News.)
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Hirshhorn Museum staff were still calibrating proximity alarms and no-go zones for the newly opened "Anselm Kiefer: Heaven and Earth," or at least let us hope so. At times I heard three different alarms shrilling in my ears. Kiefer is, for me, a fascination and a puzzle I might never solve. I fall back on echoes and comparisons: born in the last months of the Second World War, Kiefer's work suggests to me the cartoony visual play of fellow German Sigmar Polke and the smudged squeegee colors of Gerhard Richter, especially in Landscape with Head (1973), with its drawn-in sightlines and deliberate violations of pictorial conventions. Kiefer's later canvasses, heavily impastoed and bearing attached contraptions, bring to mind Robert Rauschenberg's combines projected through Mark Rothko's gloom. And the turbulent, frothing power of his paint surface is the match for any 19th-century Romantic seascape. A sculpture like The Secret Life of Plants (2001), which consists of lead plates assembled into something very like a gigantic book and painted with star charts, at once reminds us of Richard Serra's toxic, heavy, dangerous slabs; Joseph Cornell's maps of the stars; and any number of catalog-obsessed cataloging outsider artists. This same piece is painted with dots of black, each surrounded by a faded smudge of orange; these read as bullet holes to one reviewer, but look to me like poppies, offering both oblivion and remembrance of war dead. The most enigmatic piece is the stunning Meteorites (1998/2005), also sculpture: a rain of boulders has smashed through a towering bookcase holding massive codices with leaves of lead, and the heavenly hail lies scattered across the gallery floor. The piece inspires more shock and awe than any simple maneuvering of troops. For pieces like The Hierarchy of Angels (1985-87), the screws that hold the piece together are plainly visible; some bits of rigging are attached, others seem to be tying stones to the sky. It's as if Kiefer had read Tony Kusher's staging notes for another work that trades in the mystical, brutal realm of monumental eternity, Angels in America. Kushner writes, "The moments of magic... are to be fully realized, as bits of wonderful theatrical illusion—which means it's OK if the wires show, and maybe it's good that they do, but the magic should at the same time be thoroughly amazing."
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The Other River: Ripples and Vibes from DC's Southside, by Karen Zacarías and Patrick Crowley, directed by Jennifer L. Nelson, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company at THEARC (Town Hall Arts & Recreation Campus), Washington
Woolly showcases stories by community residents and a spiffy new performance space in D.C.'s 8th Ward. Songs and linked sketches draw a picture of life in the neighborhoods south of the Anacostia River, of a people with limited resources but deep reserves of pride. Production values are modest (the show gets a lot of mileage out of a front door-stoop unit and a section of chain link fence with a hole torn in it). Scene transitions could do with some tightening. Some oversized masks do great job of representing the changing racial makeup of Metro ridership as one travels through the system. The a cappella voices, music directed by James Foster Jr., sound great. The stories' resolutions may seem uniformly upbeat to more jaded viewers, but this is the show the community wants to tell itself; this is a community weary of cynicism, one that cannot afford the luxury of irony. The cast is built from Equity actors, students at the SEED school, and other community residents and professonal actors. Standouts include Vaughn Michael as Mr. Rucker, a local sparkplug who opens an organic grocery, and Maya Lynne Robinson as Latarsha, a trash-talking youngster with all the scene-stealing lines. She works at Benetton because "I speak fluent White Girl."
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All sorts of kerfluffles with theater companies downtown. Washington Shakespeare Company takes some casting liberties with Lillian Hellman's The Children's Hour (hi, Bill and Jay!) and nearly has the rights pulled. Then, an overzealous house manager at Arena Stage gets sniffy with a post by volunteer user Mindy Maddrey, who really hated Eric Overmeyer's On the Verge (thanks, Lori!). Briefly, Maddrey was disinvited from serving as an usher in future. I happen to be very fond of Overmeyer's script, though I didn't see the Arena Stage production; I'd like to think that the production let Maddrey down, rather than the text. When you see a show for free, even in exchange for some simple labor, the contract between viewer and presenter changes. Still, I think that Maddrey is more in the right than the wrong here, and I'm glad that Arena overruled its house manager and re-invited Maddrey to volunteer as an usher.
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Hmm. I just happened to check my account at Comcast and I see that I'm down to about 5% of my storage space again. A migration might be in the cards.
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Phillipp Lenssen is distributing PDF-format copies of his 55 Ways to Have Fun with Google, for free under a Creative Commons license. (Thanks to Lifehacker.)
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Erika and Leta turned up what looks to be a worthy online charity, The Virtual Foundation. Projects are small-scale ($5000 or so), and likewise depend on small-scale contributions. Projects seeking donations include: volunteer bird-banding in China, orchard recovery in Tajikistan, and solar energy for five monasteries in Georgia.
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Oh, god help us, it's another week for funny jokes in bad taste: Kinko's Manager Hopes Child Stays Missing A Little Longer. (Thanks to The Morning News.)
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Pages and pages of suggested inappropriate MetaFilter posts, those intended to "generate a lot of controversy, a flamewar, or just incredulity..."
My cat seems to be watching me more than usual lately, especially when I'm doing something I know I shouldn't. Do you think God is watching me through my cat? Or is it possible someone could be seeing through his eyes psychically?
(Thanks to things magazine.)
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Free "reality TV" design makeover = $1000 out of pocket, according to Jill Barshay.
I learned a few design tricks as the day progressed. For instance, books
are primarily visual props, not meant for reference or reading. They
should be placed in random horizontal, vertical and diagonal patterns in
a bookcase for maximum visual stimulation. Forget genre; books should be
arranged strictly by size. Every table should have two or three books of
bright colors "carelessly" lying on it, along with an empty knickknack
box and a mini bouquet of fresh roses.
(Thanks to The Morning News.)
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Another former executive of Computer Associates International (now just CA), Thomas Bennett, has pleaded guilty to obstructing justice.
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