Author: David Gorsline

Ready when you are, Miss Lamont

Via kottke.org, David S. Cohen notes that the technological transition from film to digital video is having an unexpected effect on acting styles, one that may prove as revolutionary as the introduction of sound in the late 1920s.

For actors, that additional experimentation means an entirely new way of working, says thesp Marley Shelton.

Shelton appears in both parts of Grindhouse: Robert Rodriguez’s Planet Terror was shot digitally, while Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof was shot on film.

With film, says Shelton, “there’s a beginning, middle and an end between ‘action’ and ‘cut.’ As an actor, one is trained to listen for cues such as ‘roll sound’ and slate, and you use that moment to prepare and go on a journey as your character for a few minutes or seconds. You use that time to suspend disbelief for yourself. In that 10 seconds, you’re sort of going into a zone.”

But, Shelton says, when shooting digital, the freedom to keep rolling means “you’re sort of sifting for diamonds. It’s great in that you can probe deeper in certain moments, but it’s less conducive to riding the impulses your character is having chronologically.”

Crooked CA watch: 2

Wang is wrong: a blistering report by Computer Associates’ board of directors implicates former head Charles Wang as the leader of a pervasive culture of fraud.

Mr. Wang created a “culture of fear” at Computer Associates — now called CA — and deliberately put inexperienced executives in senior positions so that he would have more control, according to the report. He discouraged executives from meeting with each other and arbitrarily fired managers or employees who disagreed with him.

“Fraud pervaded the entire CA organization at every level, and was embedded in CA’s culture, as instilled by Mr. Wang, almost from the company’s inception,” the report said.

How convenient for Wang, who stepped down as chairman in 2002, that the statute of limitations is only five years.

ESTA Festival 2007

Leta and I ran up for the weekend to Ephrata, Pa., to the Eastern States Theatre Association Festival, Leta serving as last-minute replacement techncian for Silver Spring Stage’s entry and I serving as driver and audience member. The Stage returned with an acting award (Toni as Mrs. Popov), while the excellent production of Daniel MacIvor’s Never Swim Alone from Port Tobacco Players (which we saw in Frederick, Md., in January) advanced to the national competition in Charlotte, N.C., this coming June.

Ephrata Performing Arts CenterThe black-box performance space (comfortable, roomy) is built on the bones of a venerable summer stock venue (Ephrata is an easy drive from Philadelphia) organized by John Cameron in the 1950s. Lobby and backstage photos feature Roy Scheider, Dody Goodman, Hugh Reilly, and Stephen Sondheim. The Ephrata PAC now houses a community theater presenting a half-dozen productions yearly. The building is located in a park close to the city center, on the banks of Cocalico Creek.

building detailDowntown Ephrata, in Pennsylvania Dutch country, doesn’t offer too many surprises, but the decorative brickwork ornamenting this pre-1900 building at the city’s zero-point is quite charming.

Dirty jobs

Possibly the only job worse than being personal assistant to a certain local sports team heiress (so my sources tell me): scribble, scribble, scribble quotes from Charles C. Mann’s 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus:

Minions collected and stored every object [Thupa Inka, an Inca chief] touched, food waste included, to ensure that no lesser persons could profane these objects with their touch. The ground was too dirty to receive the Inka’s saliva so he always spat into the hand of a courtier. The courier wiped the spittle with a special cloth and stored it for safekeeping.

Much worse than the time I ASM’d Forum and a cast member gave me her half-consumed cough drop to hold before she went onstage.

Just the work

Conceptual artist Sol LeWitt has left us. From Michael Kimmelman’s obit:

To the sculptor Eva Hesse, he once wrote a letter while she was living in Germany and at a point when her work was at an impasse. “Stop it and just DO,” he advised her. “Try and tickle something inside you, your ‘weird humor.’ You belong in the most secret part of you. Don’t worry about cool, make your own uncool.” He added: “You are not responsible for the world—you are only responsible for your work, so do it. And don’t think that your work has to conform to any idea or flavor. It can be anything you want it to be.”

Upgrades

Hmm. It looks like WP 2.1.x (to which I just upgraded) has hidden the linkcategories table. Come out, come out, whereever you are! My left sidebar hurts!

Specifically, I’m trying to find the equivalent code for

$link_cats = $wpdb->get_results("SELECT cat_id, cat_name FROM $wpdb->linkcategories");
foreach ($link_cats as $link_cat) {
if (get_links($link_cat->cat_id, '', '', '', FALSE, '', FALSE, FALSE, -1, FALSE, FALSE)) {
...
}
}

Howzat?

My own moment of typographical double-think, the equivalent of Jasper Johns’s trick of stencilling names of colors onto his canvasses in paint of a different color: to look up from my copy of Against the Day, out the window of the subway car at a stop on the Orange Line in Arlington, only to see Clarendon rendered in bold Helvetica.

She Stoops to Comedy

David Greenspan’s witty, very meta, very very literary masquerade of gender deception—inspired by Shakespeare, a venerable Lynn Fontanne vehicle, The Guardsman, and, so help me, Tootsie—gets off to a slightly wobbly start as Alexandra Page (Michael Russotto, a bit swishy but not at all in drag), both playwright and character in her own play, begins to sketch the action for her friend Kay Fein (a butched-up Kate Eastwood Norris). But then, that’s part of the mojo of this 100-plus-minute sprint through cross-dressing and rewrites, as Greenspan explains in a program interview:

I started the play in 1992… When I can back to it in 1999, I began to think that there was nothing wrong with having written myself into a corner—I would simply write myself out of it, but I would keep the mistakes. It’s like a canvas on which an artist has painted over a section; sometimes the underpainting shows through—a pentimento.

So sometimes Kay is an archeologist, and sometimes she is a lighting designer, one who has worked with actresses Alexandra and Alison Rose (Gia Mora, doing her best to fight off a cold last Saturday), Alexandra’s estranged paramour. And sometimes the wayward playwright typist contributes to the laughs: “She’s a treat,” Alexandra says at one point, “No, a threat! It was a typo!” At other times, a character will correct himself, and you can hear subtext and backstory leaking out through the scripted bobbles.

Alison is rehearsing an As You Like It out of town, directed by Hal Stewart (Daniel Frith) as assisted by Eve Addaman (say it backwards) (the pert Jenna Sokolowski). Alexandra concocts an alter ego, “Harry Sampson,” crashes the auditions, and slips into the cast. At rehearsals she encounters her rival Jayne Summerhouse (Norris, again, this time languidly narcissistic) and the not-really-silent Simon Lanquish (Woolly alum Daniel Escobar). Immediately we are lost in the woods of Arden and Shakespeare, who is (in the words of one character), “like a foreign language, not like Chekhov where everything is spelled out.”

Greenspan uses a wild spring mix of literary styles to tell his story. Characters speak their own stage directions. What would ordinarily be the climactic sex farce scene between “Harry” and Alison (with a drunk Simon sleeping in a chair) is related catechistically, à la Ithaca chapter of Joyce’s Ulysses.
Norris plays a showstopping scene with herself as both Jayne and Kay. (Director Howard Shalwitz pulls this scene extremely downstage onto a thrust where row A normally is, the whole framed by an artificial carved-wood proscenium, and witnessed by the other five characters/actors.) And Escobar has an equally strong punctuated monologue, “Who needs a play about…?”, an oxygenated rant about the standing of gay characters in contemporary theater.

Greenspan likewise pays tribute to a broad spectrum of influences: props are given to Irma Vep; when she’s not tearing spike tape with her teeth, Eve plays Gershwin’s “Someone to Watch Over Me” to accompany a scene.

It’s too bad about the poster design for this show, for it doesn’t convey how intelligent (and fun!) this production really is.

  • She Stoops to Comedy, by David Greenspan, directed by Howard Shalwitz, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Washington

Changes- Changes- Changes: 1

Great hopping copy editors, the hard copy edition of Washington City Paper has acquired a pair of staples! And color inside! The staples will make it easier to hold the paper together when it’s balanced off the end of the dining room table while I’m chowing down, and I’ll have to modify my one-handed pinch-at-the-spine technique that I once used for flipping through the tabloid on the subway looking for Ernie Pook’s Comeek, but now it’ll be more trouble to pull out the one sheet FilmFest DC schedule for future reference. The new layout hasn’t quite stabilized (I hope): right now it’s somewhat of a typographic pileup.

And the personals have been reduced to two pages of tease, laced with “Many more listings online!” O the humanity! Artist in Hiking Boots, please come back, all is forgiven!

Tradeoffs

A recent rule change by USDA’s National Organic Program (NOP) is likely to reduce the number of small farms overseas that seek organic certification (and hence, at least attempt to follow organic practices), as Samuel Fromartz reports. An inspection system that relies on self-policing, applicable only to imports, has been the norm.

The new USDA certification ruling arose out of a case involving an unnamed Mexican grower group that failed to detect a farmer using a prohibited insecticide and prevent empty fertilizer bags being used for crop storage—both of which violate USDA organic regulations. NOP blamed the problem on inadequate internal controls of the self-policing system and decided to ban the practice everywhere.

Unfortunately, the only beneficiaries of the new enforcement are likely to be large plantations, who can afford the more costly inspection and certification process. If smallholdings are taken out of organic production, prices to consumers here in the States will rise.