Not a lot to say this week; I haven't been doing all that much other than gallivanting around a stage (well, a stage, a beach and a jetty) as Alonso in a production of The Tempest - something I'm intending to write a post about some time in the near future. But there are a couple of things I want to talk about for now.
Mystic River (the book)
I’d seen the film version of Mystic River when it was in the cinemas, liked it a lot, and considered the Academy Awards it won – Best Actor for Sean Penn and Best Supporting Actor for Tim Robbins1 – to have been well-deserved. Clint Eastwood didn’t pick up a Best Director for it; he was, however, up against Peter Jackson for a little film called The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, so he probably wasn’t all that surprised.
The book was written by Dennis Lehane, who’s now had a few film adaptations made from his books in the last few years: Gone, Baby, Gone, directed by Ben Affleck and starring his brother Casey and which was good but not great; and Shutter Island directed by Martin Scorsese and starring Leonardo di Caprio2. I’d read the book of Shutter Island (which I wasn’t that impressed by; I haven’t seen the film) and another, Prayers for Rain, which is from the same series of books as Gone, Baby, Gone. I didn’t like that one all that much either.
But because I’d liked Mystic River the film so much I thought I’d give Lehane another chance to impress me. And I’m glad I did because it’s a brilliant, captivating book – easily one of the best crime/mystery novels I’ve read, and probably one of the best books of any genre I’ve read. I’d probably have liked it even more had I not known how it ends – the inevitable result of having seen the film – but it’s so well written that I was still sucked into it anyway.
I read a lot of crime fiction, probably as much – if not more – than my other favourite, contemporary literature3, at least in terms of raw numbers of books read; I’d like to think this gives me a reasonable familiarity with the genre – and its inevitable sub-genres – legal (i.e. from the lawyer’s perspective, like John Lescroart or John Grisham4), psychological (psychologists, like Johnathan Kellerman), detective (PIs and/or police) and so forth.
Mystic River is less of a ‘good guys chasing the bad guys’ story and more a ‘everybody is trying to work out what the hell happened and some of them happen to be police trying to solve a murder’ story. But that’s really only the beginning, since there’s a large number of characters, all complex and well-realised, who effectively narrate each part of the story.
It’s also a social commentary on life, particularly in the area where the action takes place – the tough, working-class, South Boston area5. But you can find all of these elements in any number of books, but – for me at least – none of them has managed to work in the same way as Mystic River did.
What makes it all come together is the complexity of the back-stories, the depth of the characterisation – it rivals, or possibly even surpasses that of one of my other favourite character-heavy crime writers, Jame Lee Burke – and Lehane’s skill at writing great, both descriptive and evocative, prose and dialogue. His ability with the last makes sense because it’s ‘his’ language; he grew up in South Boston, so he has an ear for the speech patterns specific to the dialect of that region. But the rest of it, well, that’s I can only assume is a combination of talent and attention to detail.
But it’s a bit weird, because I don’t remember noticing anything special about the two other Lehane works. But I’ll certainly be reading any more that I come across.
1Both also won the Golden Globes in the same categories.
2Who isn’t Martin Scorsese's brother, if you were wondering.
3Which may or may not be too broad to be of any real use, but to be any more specific I’d have to start getting into its sub-genres, and there just aren’t enough hours in the day to try and do that.
4I haven’t read a Grisham for years, though. They got a bit irritating in their self-righteousness. That nearly every single one got made into a film didn’t help.
5This was also the setting for films such as Good Will Hunting, The Departed and The Boondock Saints; it appears to be what filmmakers consider the Irish-American equivalent of New Jersey in terms of organised crime. I’ve no idea whether it’s like that in real life - but I’m fairly sure I don’t care enough to find out.
Lost
In what these days seems to be a rare occurrence, a long-running television show actually concluded – rather than just being cancelled.
I’d watched Lost from the start and – as far as I can remember – I saw all of the one hundred and twenty-one episodes. I can’t honestly say that I ever felt I truly understood what was going on, but I kept watching anyway - and I certainly indulged in what TV Tropes refers to as wild mass guessing about what the island was and why they were there. None of what I hypothesised turned out to be true, but I suspect that has as much to do with the fact that the writers were continually changing their minds in order to keep things moving along.
Some people seem upset that it wasn't 'all explained'; I'd say that expecting it to all be laid out in a satisfying way is a foolish thing, mostly because I doubt that there ever was a straight-out explanation for what the island was - because it wasn't really important.
Despite being vaguely unsatisfied with it at times, I was happy with how it ended – and, more importantly, that it was allowed to end rather than just disappearing from our screens the way so many other interesting shows with potentially long story arcs have; the most recent example being Flash Forward, which was cancelled a few weeks back; Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles was another one I followed but which won’t be returning.
There are, of course, exceptions: the shows that shouldn’t have been left to run on as long as they have because the standards had slipped not only so far that the show wasn’t good, but because the badness of it at the end began to undermine perceptions of how strong it was at the start.
The X-Files, of course, is the most well-known example of this scenario. But it’s not alone – other shows I started watching but would have preferred to see end in a blaze of glory rather than limp along to a disappointing end include Smallville and Scrubs – and, as sad as it makes me, I have to admit The Simpsons probably has to fall into that category as well. Veronica Mars really dropped off in quality in the third season, but that may have been more to do with the networks screwing around with the show than what the writers intended. Heroes was one of the best things to hit the small screen in its first series, but by halfway through the fourth I’d just stopped caring.
These are just shows that I’ve watched and (initially) liked – TV Tropes, of course, has a more thorough list in its page titled seasonal rot.
Life was another great show that doesn’t really fall into that category because it didn’t last long enough; however, it did start out well but ended less so – however, it was affected by the writer’s strike and what seemed to be cast departures. Or at least that’s how it seemed with Brooke Langton, who played main character Charlie Crewes’s lawyer and what seemed to be the intended love interest; she just kind of disappeared. Also contributing was actress Sarah Shahi, who played Crewes’s partner Reese, having her character given less screen time – though that was unavoidable given her real-life pregnancy.
It’s got to be tough to work on arc-based shows, simply because they almost always end up having their popularity wane as they go on while by their nature struggling to attract new viewers – something the networks just aren’t willing to tolerate simply to please fans. And I can only imagine the unhappiness experienced by a team of writers and producers who have gone to the effort to grind out something not only good enough to beat out the thousands of other pitched shows but which has a complex, long-term story underlying it – only to see it canned a half-dozen episodes into its first season.
But there are always shows that buck the trend. Fringe, a show I like a lot – it’s quirky and dark; two things that always impresses me – but which I am continually expecting to hear is cancelled. Though they have just announced its renewal for a third season, so there is hope. I started watching V but lost interest after a couple of episodes, but that seems to have been popular enough to justify a second season.
And no doubt there’ll always be more – I just hope that networks are prepared to give them a chance to build the kind of followings they deserve.
Monday, June 7, 2010
Monday, May 31, 2010
The week that was #16
A netbook, a computer near-illiterate and Ubuntu
I think I mentioned in one of the blog posts that I was looking at buying a netbook; well, I’ve done just that. To be precise it’s an Asus EeePC model 1001P, and it’s black (ish), tiny and was scarily inexpensive (all of $379) considering what it can do.
Having bought the device, though, was only half of the plan. The other half involved something called Ubuntu.
What the bloody hell is Ubuntu?
Well, the wikipedia entry can tell you more than I can be bothered paraphrasing, but – in short – it’s an alternative operating system to Windows that you can use to run your PC.1
1I have no idea whether, if you’re a Mac user, you can use it on your Mac; I don’t know many Mac users and none of the few has ever expressed a distaste for their OS the same way many PC users express their distaste for Windows – and Microsoft in general.
What’s the difference?
To be perfectly honest I have almost no idea, other than that Ubuntu is a Linux-based system, and Linux works differently – I guess the best way to explain how it differs from Windows is to use an example: if Windows runs on petrol then Ubuntu runs on LPG – but keep in mind that’s only a very simplistic comparison because there are other significant differences between petrol and LPG that aren’t relevant to comparing Windows and Ubuntu – and vice versa.
But it's about as effective an analogy as I could come up with. If you don't like it, feel free to provide a better one.
Why would I want that?
Partly because it’s something I’ve read some articles/blog comments etc. about and wanted to learn more; partly because my interest in computer ‘stuff’ has increased over the years, mostly because of what I do at work; and partly because Ubuntu is what they call open-source software and – this is where it gets interesting – it’s all completely free to obtain and use.
The free part is kind of redundant because the netbook came with Windows XP already on it. But it didn’t come with very much else, and I wanted a word processor and a spreadsheet program (i.e. something like Excel) and, being a cheap bastard, I didn’t want to pay however much Microsoft Office is charging these days.
Ubuntu comes with a ‘bundle’ of programs – video player, music player, social media integrator, Firefox, pretty much everything you need as well as the Open Office suite of programs – basically the open-source equivalent of MS Office. I’ve not really spent that much time on either the word processor or the spreadsheet programs, but from what I can tell they’ll be able to do exactly what I, a low-end user, need them to do – i.e. very basic writing and keeping track of my itinerary and spending habits.
So I pretty much thought ‘what the heck?’ and decided to give it a try. Since the netbook was new and had nothing whatsoever saved on it it wasn’t as if I was going to be risking losing anything important if I screwed it up completely. Sure I’d be out $379 if the whole thing went completely tits-up, but from what I read that seemed reasonably unlikely – especially considering I’d be taking the ‘dual-boot’ option – something I’ll explain in the next section.
At the very worst I’d still have a netbook that I could carry around and write reviews on, as well as take with me on holidays to use for writing and sponging free wireless internet with. Yes, I’d be a failure as a wannabe computer nerd - but surely there are worse things to be...
The joy of installation
This is where it starts to get interesting, because the standard Ubuntu package comes on cd – and netbooks don’t have a built-in cd drive; if you want one you have to buy one separately (which I didn’t do). But you can do it with a USB after you download the package either via Torrent or from the Ubuntu site (I did the former). Getting it to work, though, is a bit more fun since you’ve got to interrupt the boot-up process so you can tell it to read the USB rather than the hard drive.
That took a few goes, mostly because none of the instructions I could find could specify exactly which button (out of several options) so I was hammering away on all of them until I got to where I needed to be.
Installing is pretty straightforward: you work your way through selecting options like language and location and so forth – but then came the important part, which was choosing whether to erase the existing OS (Windows XP in my case) and using only Ubuntu, or going for the dual-boot option.
Dual-boot is like it sounds – you have both OSs on your hard drive and when you switch your computer on you just choose which one you want to work with. Yeah, it’s like wanting to have one’s cake and eat it to, but since I wasn’t that sure I wouldn’t do something that’d completely screw up the Ubuntu install I wanted to have a backup option so that the netbook I’d just bought wouldn’t end up a largish Asus-branded paperweight.
However, for whatever reason, I got the installation part and it wasn’t giving me the options I was expecting to see – it was telling me that I could only either go all-Ubuntu, or choose to manually partition my drive.
Where the bloody hell was the side-by-side dual-boot option everyone described?
After much Googling, no small amount of swearing, and trying – without really having any idea what I was doing – to manually partition the drive to set it to what was being described by other users, I decided I would just bite the damn bullet and go for the Ubuntu-only option and wipe Win7 completely. However, this time when I got to the partition option, it was presenting me with the previously-absent option of side-by-side installation.
Apparently, my ham-handed attempt at manually partitioning had changed the drive into whatever it was the installer wanted to see. It kind of begs the question of how I’d managed to get it out of that state in the first place, since I had – as far as knew – done almost nothing to the machine other than register my copy of Windows and take a picture with the built-in camera.
But at that point I really didn’t care; it was working.
Getting used to it
Ubuntu uses a graphic interface not unlike Windows and Macs – things have different names and are in different places, but it works much along the same lines. Working out which things do what, and where they are stored is proving interesting, but that was always going to be the case so I haven’t felt frustrated in the few hours I’ve spent playing around with it.
Installing things and fixing bugs
The timing of my purchasing the netbook and entering the world of Ubuntu coincided with the release of its newest incarnation – version 10.04, or Lucid Lynx.2 This is both a good and a bad thing; good because it’s new and exciting and (allegedly) an improvement on the previous release and bad because – like everything else these days – it’s released to the world whether it’s ready or not, and any bugs get fixed afterwards.
Having a netbook is more complicated, because there are all sorts of hardware issues to deal with – for starters, 10.04 didn’t include the drivers for the wireless card in my netbook; I had to install a program that’d allow me to use a Windows driver. Then there was the screen brightness issue, which also needed some playing around with code to fix.
But that’s what open-source is all about. They don’t do everything for you; either someone works out how to do it and publishes the instructions for you to follow, or – if you’re clever and knowledgeable enough – you can do it yourself.
I am, of course, in no way suggesting I am clever or knowledgeable enough. But I’m hoping that I can become at least slightly more clever and/or knowledgeable enough than I am now. And it’s easy to access the code to tinker with things, since there’s a terminal that gets you straight into where you can modify it.
Yes, it’s a bit daunting – but, like I said, the joy of doing all of this on a cheap netbook is that I don’t mind losing anything I’ve saved on it (I’ll back up everything significant on USB before I do anything even vaguely experimental) and even if I cook the damn thing somehow, I’ll only be out a few hundred dollars rather.
Still, I don’t really intend for that to happen. Stay tuned for updates!
2All Ubuntu releases have alliterative names and they’ve been going in alphabetical order; the previous one was Karmic Koala and, before that, Jaunty Jackalope. No, I’m not kidding.
Survivor: Heroes vs Villains
Spoilers ahoy.
At the end of the last Survivor series I started writing a blog entry but I wasn’t happy with it so I never took it any further – but now, since I’m looking to make my weekly entries cover more than one topic, I’ll give it another shot.
If you haven’t been watching it, Survivor: Heroes vs. Villains took twenty players from the previous seasons, divided them into two groups (the eponymous Heroes and Villains, based on how they’d been perceived4 as playing the game) and pitted them against each other, much like the two tribe format that’s been the standard. Both teams had people who’d won it previously, as well as those who’d come runner-up – plus a few of the other notorious characters from the past seasons.
However, most of the attention went on the guy who’d been the centre of attention in the last season, Russell Hantz. He’d dominated the game through force of personality, the sneakiest of tactics (he sabotaged his own team), flat-out bullying and no small amount of luck. Of course, the relative cluelessness – and, in some cases, sheer obliviousness – of some of his team members didn’t hurt either.
But he’d gotten to the end and, to the surprise of many, didn’t win. This reflected a very important aspect of the game that people – particularly those who were fans of Russell’s and who had expected him to win easily – had forgotten: the jury are deciding whether or not to give you a million dollars. Yes, to be where you are you have to have betrayed some (if not all) of them, broken your word, gone behind people’s backs and generally done whatever it was you needed to do to get yourself to the end; that is, after all, what the game is about.
But you’ve got to do it in such a way that the jury-members still respect how you went about – and Russell learned the hard way that being lied to is one thing, but being bullied and abused and treated with contempt is another.
A lot of the appeal – for me at least - of Heroes vs. Villians was about whether or not Russell would go down the same path again. But I’d hoped that, unlike the not-especially-bright people in his own series, the experienced players would either beat him at his own game or simply get sick of his toxic personality and just ditch him when the first opportunity. But – sadly – neither the other villains or the merged tribe (Yin-Yang) gave me the pleasure of seeing his flame extinguished; he got to the end and faced the final jury vote to determine the winner.
But, prior to that, we were treated to some of the best Survivor action we’d seen over the past nineteen seasons4. In a way I wish the weekly episodes were two hours long with more time devoted to the challenges, the tribal councils (which, according to reports, often go for hours rather than the 5-10mins we see) and the scheming amongst the players.
What I think surprised me, though, was what was the amazing stupidity of some of the players who’d demonstrated far more insight in their previous seasons. JT – who won his series5 – and Tyson in particular made some colossally stupid moves. Prior to the merge people made post-merge plans that ended up causing them problems – I can’t imagine that if Stephenie or Tom had been there they would have let JT give the idol to Russell, which was the move that effectively ruined the game for the Heroes team.
At one point I commented to a work colleague – one of the few other people I know who actually watch the show – that Russell’s real talent was to somehow emit a beam that made anyone in his immediate vicinity do astonishingly stupid things. Yes, some of the time – like with Tyson – he did some clever manipulating, but other times he didn’t even have to say a word for the other person to act like they’d taken a blow to the head.
But no matter how he managed to do it, he didn’t get eliminated. In the context of the heroes versus the villains, evil effectively won over good as the final three were all villains – Parvati, Russell and the eventual winner, Sandra. I was not that surprised, but my vote would have gone to Parvati since I felt she played a game that incorporated more of the different aspects; she did do well in challenges while Sandra didn’t. But the jury evidently felt that Parvati had ridden, if not strictly on Russell’s coattails, at least in his wake, and their resentment toward him led them to favour Sandra, who did a very good job of distancing herself from him.
At the ‘reunion’, Russell expressed his annoyance at how the winner is deciding, arguing that it should be an audience vote rather than a jury vote. Which is a reasonable point in a sense – except that everyone on the show would therefore be playing to win the audience vote, and the result would be very different and still not necessarily end in Russell winning.
Russell’s antics made him look like a bad loser – again – and pretty much guaranteed he’ll be remembered as the most hated contestant – at least by other contestants who’ve played with him – of all time.
I don’t think they should change the game, and I seriously doubt they’d even contemplate it – in the past they’ve tried an audience vote for an audience-voted million-dollar prize (separate from the main prize) before, but they realised that it would change the way the game is played and never awarded it again. However, there is a $100 000 audience-voted prize which, hilariously enough, Russell won both times he played.
The jury aspect is as much a part of the game as anything else, and if you’re going to be a overtly bullying asshole you’re never going to win. Sure, you’re almost certainly going to have to be sneaky, underhanded and cunning – but when you do, do it in such a way that it only makes them resent you rather than loathe you. And make sure that the people you’re at the end with have done as much – or, better yet, worse – than you have to get there.
I did spend some time wondering why no-one other than Sandra was agitating to get Russell out, but then I realised that they knew what we didn’t necessarily realise (thanks to editing): that those who had already gone hated Russell with an incendiary passion and were never, ever going to vote for him – which meant that going into the final three with him next to you meant it was more like a final two.
Russell was always going to be the person with the worst track record – and, more importantly, no idea that having done what he did would mean people would vote against him or – even more importantly again – that perhaps it’d be a good idea to try and present a context in which his actions could be seen to have been necessary. Which is not exactly impossible; players have done that before and done so in a way that meant they won over at least some of the jury.
Essentially, what really cost Russell the million dollars (twice) is that he was unable to even pretend to respect how the other people played the game. He just went in there and said ‘you guys were idiots; I’m better than you and you should vote for me.’ It’s not that much of a leap to say, ‘yeah, I outwitted you, but I still have respect for how you played the game’ – but he refused to do that. Or admit that luck played a part – which it always does. It was lucky for him JT found an idol not someone else. It was lucky for him Danielle found an idol and not Amanda; both were game-changing events that had nothing to do with him or his actions.
Considering there’s never been anyone who’s possessed the talents of manipulation, good fortune and cunning while also being utterly clueless about the impact of bullying and the expression naked contempt for their fellow competitors, I don’t expect we’ll see any future players attempting to replicate Russell’s ‘style’ – but you never know; he’s obviously someone the producers saw as a way to ensure an audience, and I have to admit one of the reasons I watched was to see how he’d do.
I guess we’ll see in the next season.
3I used the term perceived for a reason; in reality, determining which actions are heroic and which are villainous seemed very sketchy indeed. But it sounded cool, and made for some interesting watching if for no other reason than to see whether someone considered a villain would act more like one because of how they’d been labelled.
4I’ve watched most, but not all, of them.
5Which makes his series (Tocantins) more interesting in retrospect, since his epic dumbassery suggests that he wasn’t the one making the clever moves, it was his ally Stephen – who he beat at final tribal council for the million dollars – which is something didn’t really come through in how that series was edited.
I think I mentioned in one of the blog posts that I was looking at buying a netbook; well, I’ve done just that. To be precise it’s an Asus EeePC model 1001P, and it’s black (ish), tiny and was scarily inexpensive (all of $379) considering what it can do.
Having bought the device, though, was only half of the plan. The other half involved something called Ubuntu.
What the bloody hell is Ubuntu?
Well, the wikipedia entry can tell you more than I can be bothered paraphrasing, but – in short – it’s an alternative operating system to Windows that you can use to run your PC.1
1I have no idea whether, if you’re a Mac user, you can use it on your Mac; I don’t know many Mac users and none of the few has ever expressed a distaste for their OS the same way many PC users express their distaste for Windows – and Microsoft in general.
What’s the difference?
To be perfectly honest I have almost no idea, other than that Ubuntu is a Linux-based system, and Linux works differently – I guess the best way to explain how it differs from Windows is to use an example: if Windows runs on petrol then Ubuntu runs on LPG – but keep in mind that’s only a very simplistic comparison because there are other significant differences between petrol and LPG that aren’t relevant to comparing Windows and Ubuntu – and vice versa.
But it's about as effective an analogy as I could come up with. If you don't like it, feel free to provide a better one.
Why would I want that?
Partly because it’s something I’ve read some articles/blog comments etc. about and wanted to learn more; partly because my interest in computer ‘stuff’ has increased over the years, mostly because of what I do at work; and partly because Ubuntu is what they call open-source software and – this is where it gets interesting – it’s all completely free to obtain and use.
The free part is kind of redundant because the netbook came with Windows XP already on it. But it didn’t come with very much else, and I wanted a word processor and a spreadsheet program (i.e. something like Excel) and, being a cheap bastard, I didn’t want to pay however much Microsoft Office is charging these days.
Ubuntu comes with a ‘bundle’ of programs – video player, music player, social media integrator, Firefox, pretty much everything you need as well as the Open Office suite of programs – basically the open-source equivalent of MS Office. I’ve not really spent that much time on either the word processor or the spreadsheet programs, but from what I can tell they’ll be able to do exactly what I, a low-end user, need them to do – i.e. very basic writing and keeping track of my itinerary and spending habits.
So I pretty much thought ‘what the heck?’ and decided to give it a try. Since the netbook was new and had nothing whatsoever saved on it it wasn’t as if I was going to be risking losing anything important if I screwed it up completely. Sure I’d be out $379 if the whole thing went completely tits-up, but from what I read that seemed reasonably unlikely – especially considering I’d be taking the ‘dual-boot’ option – something I’ll explain in the next section.
At the very worst I’d still have a netbook that I could carry around and write reviews on, as well as take with me on holidays to use for writing and sponging free wireless internet with. Yes, I’d be a failure as a wannabe computer nerd - but surely there are worse things to be...
The joy of installation
This is where it starts to get interesting, because the standard Ubuntu package comes on cd – and netbooks don’t have a built-in cd drive; if you want one you have to buy one separately (which I didn’t do). But you can do it with a USB after you download the package either via Torrent or from the Ubuntu site (I did the former). Getting it to work, though, is a bit more fun since you’ve got to interrupt the boot-up process so you can tell it to read the USB rather than the hard drive.
That took a few goes, mostly because none of the instructions I could find could specify exactly which button (out of several options) so I was hammering away on all of them until I got to where I needed to be.
Installing is pretty straightforward: you work your way through selecting options like language and location and so forth – but then came the important part, which was choosing whether to erase the existing OS (Windows XP in my case) and using only Ubuntu, or going for the dual-boot option.
Dual-boot is like it sounds – you have both OSs on your hard drive and when you switch your computer on you just choose which one you want to work with. Yeah, it’s like wanting to have one’s cake and eat it to, but since I wasn’t that sure I wouldn’t do something that’d completely screw up the Ubuntu install I wanted to have a backup option so that the netbook I’d just bought wouldn’t end up a largish Asus-branded paperweight.
However, for whatever reason, I got the installation part and it wasn’t giving me the options I was expecting to see – it was telling me that I could only either go all-Ubuntu, or choose to manually partition my drive.
Where the bloody hell was the side-by-side dual-boot option everyone described?
After much Googling, no small amount of swearing, and trying – without really having any idea what I was doing – to manually partition the drive to set it to what was being described by other users, I decided I would just bite the damn bullet and go for the Ubuntu-only option and wipe Win7 completely. However, this time when I got to the partition option, it was presenting me with the previously-absent option of side-by-side installation.
Apparently, my ham-handed attempt at manually partitioning had changed the drive into whatever it was the installer wanted to see. It kind of begs the question of how I’d managed to get it out of that state in the first place, since I had – as far as knew – done almost nothing to the machine other than register my copy of Windows and take a picture with the built-in camera.
But at that point I really didn’t care; it was working.
Getting used to it
Ubuntu uses a graphic interface not unlike Windows and Macs – things have different names and are in different places, but it works much along the same lines. Working out which things do what, and where they are stored is proving interesting, but that was always going to be the case so I haven’t felt frustrated in the few hours I’ve spent playing around with it.
Installing things and fixing bugs
The timing of my purchasing the netbook and entering the world of Ubuntu coincided with the release of its newest incarnation – version 10.04, or Lucid Lynx.2 This is both a good and a bad thing; good because it’s new and exciting and (allegedly) an improvement on the previous release and bad because – like everything else these days – it’s released to the world whether it’s ready or not, and any bugs get fixed afterwards.
Having a netbook is more complicated, because there are all sorts of hardware issues to deal with – for starters, 10.04 didn’t include the drivers for the wireless card in my netbook; I had to install a program that’d allow me to use a Windows driver. Then there was the screen brightness issue, which also needed some playing around with code to fix.
But that’s what open-source is all about. They don’t do everything for you; either someone works out how to do it and publishes the instructions for you to follow, or – if you’re clever and knowledgeable enough – you can do it yourself.
I am, of course, in no way suggesting I am clever or knowledgeable enough. But I’m hoping that I can become at least slightly more clever and/or knowledgeable enough than I am now. And it’s easy to access the code to tinker with things, since there’s a terminal that gets you straight into where you can modify it.
Yes, it’s a bit daunting – but, like I said, the joy of doing all of this on a cheap netbook is that I don’t mind losing anything I’ve saved on it (I’ll back up everything significant on USB before I do anything even vaguely experimental) and even if I cook the damn thing somehow, I’ll only be out a few hundred dollars rather.
Still, I don’t really intend for that to happen. Stay tuned for updates!
2All Ubuntu releases have alliterative names and they’ve been going in alphabetical order; the previous one was Karmic Koala and, before that, Jaunty Jackalope. No, I’m not kidding.
Survivor: Heroes vs Villains
Spoilers ahoy.
At the end of the last Survivor series I started writing a blog entry but I wasn’t happy with it so I never took it any further – but now, since I’m looking to make my weekly entries cover more than one topic, I’ll give it another shot.
If you haven’t been watching it, Survivor: Heroes vs. Villains took twenty players from the previous seasons, divided them into two groups (the eponymous Heroes and Villains, based on how they’d been perceived4 as playing the game) and pitted them against each other, much like the two tribe format that’s been the standard. Both teams had people who’d won it previously, as well as those who’d come runner-up – plus a few of the other notorious characters from the past seasons.
However, most of the attention went on the guy who’d been the centre of attention in the last season, Russell Hantz. He’d dominated the game through force of personality, the sneakiest of tactics (he sabotaged his own team), flat-out bullying and no small amount of luck. Of course, the relative cluelessness – and, in some cases, sheer obliviousness – of some of his team members didn’t hurt either.
But he’d gotten to the end and, to the surprise of many, didn’t win. This reflected a very important aspect of the game that people – particularly those who were fans of Russell’s and who had expected him to win easily – had forgotten: the jury are deciding whether or not to give you a million dollars. Yes, to be where you are you have to have betrayed some (if not all) of them, broken your word, gone behind people’s backs and generally done whatever it was you needed to do to get yourself to the end; that is, after all, what the game is about.
But you’ve got to do it in such a way that the jury-members still respect how you went about – and Russell learned the hard way that being lied to is one thing, but being bullied and abused and treated with contempt is another.
A lot of the appeal – for me at least - of Heroes vs. Villians was about whether or not Russell would go down the same path again. But I’d hoped that, unlike the not-especially-bright people in his own series, the experienced players would either beat him at his own game or simply get sick of his toxic personality and just ditch him when the first opportunity. But – sadly – neither the other villains or the merged tribe (Yin-Yang) gave me the pleasure of seeing his flame extinguished; he got to the end and faced the final jury vote to determine the winner.
But, prior to that, we were treated to some of the best Survivor action we’d seen over the past nineteen seasons4. In a way I wish the weekly episodes were two hours long with more time devoted to the challenges, the tribal councils (which, according to reports, often go for hours rather than the 5-10mins we see) and the scheming amongst the players.
What I think surprised me, though, was what was the amazing stupidity of some of the players who’d demonstrated far more insight in their previous seasons. JT – who won his series5 – and Tyson in particular made some colossally stupid moves. Prior to the merge people made post-merge plans that ended up causing them problems – I can’t imagine that if Stephenie or Tom had been there they would have let JT give the idol to Russell, which was the move that effectively ruined the game for the Heroes team.
At one point I commented to a work colleague – one of the few other people I know who actually watch the show – that Russell’s real talent was to somehow emit a beam that made anyone in his immediate vicinity do astonishingly stupid things. Yes, some of the time – like with Tyson – he did some clever manipulating, but other times he didn’t even have to say a word for the other person to act like they’d taken a blow to the head.
But no matter how he managed to do it, he didn’t get eliminated. In the context of the heroes versus the villains, evil effectively won over good as the final three were all villains – Parvati, Russell and the eventual winner, Sandra. I was not that surprised, but my vote would have gone to Parvati since I felt she played a game that incorporated more of the different aspects; she did do well in challenges while Sandra didn’t. But the jury evidently felt that Parvati had ridden, if not strictly on Russell’s coattails, at least in his wake, and their resentment toward him led them to favour Sandra, who did a very good job of distancing herself from him.
At the ‘reunion’, Russell expressed his annoyance at how the winner is deciding, arguing that it should be an audience vote rather than a jury vote. Which is a reasonable point in a sense – except that everyone on the show would therefore be playing to win the audience vote, and the result would be very different and still not necessarily end in Russell winning.
Russell’s antics made him look like a bad loser – again – and pretty much guaranteed he’ll be remembered as the most hated contestant – at least by other contestants who’ve played with him – of all time.
I don’t think they should change the game, and I seriously doubt they’d even contemplate it – in the past they’ve tried an audience vote for an audience-voted million-dollar prize (separate from the main prize) before, but they realised that it would change the way the game is played and never awarded it again. However, there is a $100 000 audience-voted prize which, hilariously enough, Russell won both times he played.
The jury aspect is as much a part of the game as anything else, and if you’re going to be a overtly bullying asshole you’re never going to win. Sure, you’re almost certainly going to have to be sneaky, underhanded and cunning – but when you do, do it in such a way that it only makes them resent you rather than loathe you. And make sure that the people you’re at the end with have done as much – or, better yet, worse – than you have to get there.
I did spend some time wondering why no-one other than Sandra was agitating to get Russell out, but then I realised that they knew what we didn’t necessarily realise (thanks to editing): that those who had already gone hated Russell with an incendiary passion and were never, ever going to vote for him – which meant that going into the final three with him next to you meant it was more like a final two.
Russell was always going to be the person with the worst track record – and, more importantly, no idea that having done what he did would mean people would vote against him or – even more importantly again – that perhaps it’d be a good idea to try and present a context in which his actions could be seen to have been necessary. Which is not exactly impossible; players have done that before and done so in a way that meant they won over at least some of the jury.
Essentially, what really cost Russell the million dollars (twice) is that he was unable to even pretend to respect how the other people played the game. He just went in there and said ‘you guys were idiots; I’m better than you and you should vote for me.’ It’s not that much of a leap to say, ‘yeah, I outwitted you, but I still have respect for how you played the game’ – but he refused to do that. Or admit that luck played a part – which it always does. It was lucky for him JT found an idol not someone else. It was lucky for him Danielle found an idol and not Amanda; both were game-changing events that had nothing to do with him or his actions.
Considering there’s never been anyone who’s possessed the talents of manipulation, good fortune and cunning while also being utterly clueless about the impact of bullying and the expression naked contempt for their fellow competitors, I don’t expect we’ll see any future players attempting to replicate Russell’s ‘style’ – but you never know; he’s obviously someone the producers saw as a way to ensure an audience, and I have to admit one of the reasons I watched was to see how he’d do.
I guess we’ll see in the next season.
3I used the term perceived for a reason; in reality, determining which actions are heroic and which are villainous seemed very sketchy indeed. But it sounded cool, and made for some interesting watching if for no other reason than to see whether someone considered a villain would act more like one because of how they’d been labelled.
4I’ve watched most, but not all, of them.
5Which makes his series (Tocantins) more interesting in retrospect, since his epic dumbassery suggests that he wasn’t the one making the clever moves, it was his ally Stephen – who he beat at final tribal council for the million dollars – which is something didn’t really come through in how that series was edited.
Monday, May 24, 2010
The week that was #15
Love in the Time of Cholera
I actually finished this the previous week but ran out of time to write about it – so now’s going to do.
Love in the Time of Cholera, if you aren’t aware, is a novel by Nobel laureate Gabriel García Márquez1. While it’s generally considered to be a lesser work than One Hundred Years of Solitude, I actually like it more.
I’m not really sure why; I believe it may be because it’s more straightforward in terms of narrative2 – it’s set in what is probably Colombia and is about (mostly) two people, a boy (Florentino Ariza) and a girl (Fermina Daza) who fall in love as teenagers but, after several years of secret romance and her being exiled by her father who does not approve, she realises she doesn’t want to marry him and cuts off all communication.
He pines; she, not long after, meets and eventually marries Dr Juvenal Urbino, an eligible young man from an ‘old money’ family. Fifty years later Dr Urbino dies from a fall (chasing an unusually verbose parrot) and, the following afternoon, Florentino Ariza arrives and announces that he is still in love with Fermina Daza.
This is only the beginning; the rest of the story is about what takes place in both their lives in the intervening period – and then (briefly) what happens afterwards.
It’s not as sweet and wholesome as that description might make it sound3; after being spurned, Florentino Ariza goes on what can only be described as a lifelong nailing frenzy of epic proportions, amassing so many notches on his belt he filled several notebooks with reminiscences of his debauchery – with more than a few of them being less than appropriate, to put it mildly.
Fermina Daza, on the other hand, lives a more upright life, but she eventually realises that she does not truly love – in the romantic, idyllic sense – her husband nor he her. But they stay together anyway out of a sense of duty.
But for me it’s really less about the story and more about how it’s told – wonderful, rich prose – and what it represents, i.e. the complexity of the characters reflects so many aspects of human behaviour, particularly the behaviour of those from a culture and an era that embraced emotion and passion rather than represses it or subverts it the way today’s society does.
Oh, and for the trivia buffs – Love in the Time of Cholera has been referenced in not one but two John Cusack films: High Fidelity and Serendipity. In the former he lists it, along with The Unbearable Lightness of Being as some of the books he’s read (‘...I think I understood them. They’re about girls, right? Just kidding’) and in the latter it is a copy of it that Kate Beckinsale’s character writes her contact details in – in order to see if the universe wants them to be together - and which, years later, he finds and decides to try and track her down.
1I hope you all appreciate the effort I go to with intonation marks.
2One Hundred Years of Solitude is a lot heavier in its use of magical realism and a vast number of characters; I think I prefer the (relative) naturalism and simplicity of ‘Cholera’.
3García Márquez, in an interview, described that aspect of it as a ‘trap’, and stressed that the story is far more complex; however, this is still how most people think of the book.
42nd Street
I’d never seen 42nd Street before; I was under the impression that it was a) an old-timey musical and b) one that got put on a lot because its popularity, but it turns out I was wrong on both counts – it appeared on Broadway in 1980 and no-one that I’m aware of has been in production of it.
While it’s very much a fluff piece – good-hearted girl from the sticks overcomes adversity to make it good in musical theatre– it’s enjoyable, fun stuff with some great song-and-dance numbers.
It’s something important to remember about theatre – different shows exist for different purposes. This is very important to me as a reviewer, because I can’t go to something bleak (say, The Crucible) and complain that they didn’t at any point make me laugh. Likewise, I can’t go to a ‘whoops where’s my trousers?’ style British farce and moan about how there was no social commentary or that I didn’t learn anything from it – well, other than to not cheat on my wife with a mistress who will, after I upset her greatly by ending our illicit affair, turn out to also be the girlfriend of my wife’s humourless boss – the boss who’s coming to dinner at our house the very same evening and who my highly-strung wife insists will give her the big promotion if everything goes well.
Say, there might be something in that...
A Theatrical Leave of Absence
Tempest starts next week (details here – yes, it’s shameless plugging; live with it) and I’m taking two weeks off work while it’s on. It’s not something everyone does (if they have the option), but for me it’s been fairly standard practice since I started working full-time with paid leave.
There are number of reasons for this.
One reason is that on weeknights I generally go to bed early in order to get plenty of sleep since I find that work is onerous enough as it is, and it’s most certainly not made any less so by being tired.
Theatre, of course, is a nighttime activity; amateur shows, at least in Adelaide, almost always start at 8pm4. A typical show will last between two and three hours, meaning that the earliest we’re evening contemplating getting out of the theatre is after 10pm – and often much later – which is a problem for me because on every weeknight I can manage it I’m in bed before 11.
But that’s only the half of it; the other is how hard I find it to ‘come down’ after a show. I have enough trouble getting to sleep as it is; the way I tend to describe it is that I don’t ‘fall’ asleep as much as ‘am pushed by sheer force of will’. The key to a good theatrical performance is energy, so to do what’s needed on stage I have to get about as alert as I can get and it takes time for that to wear off. If you throw some kind of post-show celebration on top of that then it’s likely I wouldn’t be in bed before midnight and almost certainly wouldn’t be asleep for another hour after that – at best.
To spend close to two weeks getting less sleep than I’d prefer, and compounding that tiredness and the inevitable irritability that comes with it5 is not something I’d choose if I had the option. But I did have the option, and that brings me to reason number two: a surfeit of leave.
Because I don’t take actual holidays – the packing and travelling kind - very often and I’ve been a permanent employee (i.e. one who gets four weeks paid leave each year) for something like four years now, the leave I’ve earned6 has been building up – yes, I do the theatre leave pretty much every time I do a show, but I haven’t been doing that many shows – two a year at most – and I don’t always take the two weeks I’m taking this time around.
So, prior to taking these two weeks, I’d built up over eight weeks worth of leave – and this, apparently, is something management frowns upon. So, the orders came from up high to get my accumulation down below the eight-week maximum. It was never mentioned what the consequences of not taking leave would be, but I’m sure a vicious sack-beating could have been involved.
And now I’ve got myself two weeks’ worth of sleeping in and being baffled by the awfulness of daytime television. Oh, and writing blog stuff – I’ve got specific posts about Tempest and the new netbook and its conversion from Windows to Ubuntu to do – plus watching some of the backlog on my DVR’s hard drive (I’m going to have a marathon of the remaining Lost episodes once the finale has aired), rearranging things in my house, learning about the aforementioned Ubuntu, going to the gym as much as possible (potential ill health permitting – there’s a good chance I’ll get sick because of the show) and reading a few books.
Oh, and do two previews and eight proper performances of Tempest. Good times!
4This isn’t universal; some companies have 7.30 as their standard start time, and then there are things like matinees (early afternoon) and twilight performances (late afternoon/early evening).
5I’m sure I’ve mentioned in at least one previous post that being tired makes me grumpy – and that’s probably putting it politely.
6That might be using the term loosely. Perhaps I should have written ‘acquired’.
I actually finished this the previous week but ran out of time to write about it – so now’s going to do.
Love in the Time of Cholera, if you aren’t aware, is a novel by Nobel laureate Gabriel García Márquez1. While it’s generally considered to be a lesser work than One Hundred Years of Solitude, I actually like it more.
I’m not really sure why; I believe it may be because it’s more straightforward in terms of narrative2 – it’s set in what is probably Colombia and is about (mostly) two people, a boy (Florentino Ariza) and a girl (Fermina Daza) who fall in love as teenagers but, after several years of secret romance and her being exiled by her father who does not approve, she realises she doesn’t want to marry him and cuts off all communication.
He pines; she, not long after, meets and eventually marries Dr Juvenal Urbino, an eligible young man from an ‘old money’ family. Fifty years later Dr Urbino dies from a fall (chasing an unusually verbose parrot) and, the following afternoon, Florentino Ariza arrives and announces that he is still in love with Fermina Daza.
This is only the beginning; the rest of the story is about what takes place in both their lives in the intervening period – and then (briefly) what happens afterwards.
It’s not as sweet and wholesome as that description might make it sound3; after being spurned, Florentino Ariza goes on what can only be described as a lifelong nailing frenzy of epic proportions, amassing so many notches on his belt he filled several notebooks with reminiscences of his debauchery – with more than a few of them being less than appropriate, to put it mildly.
Fermina Daza, on the other hand, lives a more upright life, but she eventually realises that she does not truly love – in the romantic, idyllic sense – her husband nor he her. But they stay together anyway out of a sense of duty.
But for me it’s really less about the story and more about how it’s told – wonderful, rich prose – and what it represents, i.e. the complexity of the characters reflects so many aspects of human behaviour, particularly the behaviour of those from a culture and an era that embraced emotion and passion rather than represses it or subverts it the way today’s society does.
Oh, and for the trivia buffs – Love in the Time of Cholera has been referenced in not one but two John Cusack films: High Fidelity and Serendipity. In the former he lists it, along with The Unbearable Lightness of Being as some of the books he’s read (‘...I think I understood them. They’re about girls, right? Just kidding’) and in the latter it is a copy of it that Kate Beckinsale’s character writes her contact details in – in order to see if the universe wants them to be together - and which, years later, he finds and decides to try and track her down.
1I hope you all appreciate the effort I go to with intonation marks.
2One Hundred Years of Solitude is a lot heavier in its use of magical realism and a vast number of characters; I think I prefer the (relative) naturalism and simplicity of ‘Cholera’.
3García Márquez, in an interview, described that aspect of it as a ‘trap’, and stressed that the story is far more complex; however, this is still how most people think of the book.
42nd Street
I’d never seen 42nd Street before; I was under the impression that it was a) an old-timey musical and b) one that got put on a lot because its popularity, but it turns out I was wrong on both counts – it appeared on Broadway in 1980 and no-one that I’m aware of has been in production of it.
While it’s very much a fluff piece – good-hearted girl from the sticks overcomes adversity to make it good in musical theatre– it’s enjoyable, fun stuff with some great song-and-dance numbers.
It’s something important to remember about theatre – different shows exist for different purposes. This is very important to me as a reviewer, because I can’t go to something bleak (say, The Crucible) and complain that they didn’t at any point make me laugh. Likewise, I can’t go to a ‘whoops where’s my trousers?’ style British farce and moan about how there was no social commentary or that I didn’t learn anything from it – well, other than to not cheat on my wife with a mistress who will, after I upset her greatly by ending our illicit affair, turn out to also be the girlfriend of my wife’s humourless boss – the boss who’s coming to dinner at our house the very same evening and who my highly-strung wife insists will give her the big promotion if everything goes well.
Say, there might be something in that...
A Theatrical Leave of Absence
Tempest starts next week (details here – yes, it’s shameless plugging; live with it) and I’m taking two weeks off work while it’s on. It’s not something everyone does (if they have the option), but for me it’s been fairly standard practice since I started working full-time with paid leave.
There are number of reasons for this.
One reason is that on weeknights I generally go to bed early in order to get plenty of sleep since I find that work is onerous enough as it is, and it’s most certainly not made any less so by being tired.
Theatre, of course, is a nighttime activity; amateur shows, at least in Adelaide, almost always start at 8pm4. A typical show will last between two and three hours, meaning that the earliest we’re evening contemplating getting out of the theatre is after 10pm – and often much later – which is a problem for me because on every weeknight I can manage it I’m in bed before 11.
But that’s only the half of it; the other is how hard I find it to ‘come down’ after a show. I have enough trouble getting to sleep as it is; the way I tend to describe it is that I don’t ‘fall’ asleep as much as ‘am pushed by sheer force of will’. The key to a good theatrical performance is energy, so to do what’s needed on stage I have to get about as alert as I can get and it takes time for that to wear off. If you throw some kind of post-show celebration on top of that then it’s likely I wouldn’t be in bed before midnight and almost certainly wouldn’t be asleep for another hour after that – at best.
To spend close to two weeks getting less sleep than I’d prefer, and compounding that tiredness and the inevitable irritability that comes with it5 is not something I’d choose if I had the option. But I did have the option, and that brings me to reason number two: a surfeit of leave.
Because I don’t take actual holidays – the packing and travelling kind - very often and I’ve been a permanent employee (i.e. one who gets four weeks paid leave each year) for something like four years now, the leave I’ve earned6 has been building up – yes, I do the theatre leave pretty much every time I do a show, but I haven’t been doing that many shows – two a year at most – and I don’t always take the two weeks I’m taking this time around.
So, prior to taking these two weeks, I’d built up over eight weeks worth of leave – and this, apparently, is something management frowns upon. So, the orders came from up high to get my accumulation down below the eight-week maximum. It was never mentioned what the consequences of not taking leave would be, but I’m sure a vicious sack-beating could have been involved.
And now I’ve got myself two weeks’ worth of sleeping in and being baffled by the awfulness of daytime television. Oh, and writing blog stuff – I’ve got specific posts about Tempest and the new netbook and its conversion from Windows to Ubuntu to do – plus watching some of the backlog on my DVR’s hard drive (I’m going to have a marathon of the remaining Lost episodes once the finale has aired), rearranging things in my house, learning about the aforementioned Ubuntu, going to the gym as much as possible (potential ill health permitting – there’s a good chance I’ll get sick because of the show) and reading a few books.
Oh, and do two previews and eight proper performances of Tempest. Good times!
4This isn’t universal; some companies have 7.30 as their standard start time, and then there are things like matinees (early afternoon) and twilight performances (late afternoon/early evening).
5I’m sure I’ve mentioned in at least one previous post that being tired makes me grumpy – and that’s probably putting it politely.
6That might be using the term loosely. Perhaps I should have written ‘acquired’.
Sunday, May 16, 2010
The week that was #14
A daily dose of gross vegetable juice
Vegetables and I don't get along. We really don't. And I've given up buying them because, short of one or two ways - all including the addition of other substances that disguise their awful, awful vegetable taste - I can't eat them.
And I'm also a lazy, lazy person - so cutting/shelling/skinning or whatever the heck else you need to do to vegetables to prepare them is also an annoyance, particularly these days when I'm frequently pressed for time and have to get myself fed before heading out to rehearsal or to whatever other event I may be attending.
In the past I've tried to be good and buy vegetables, but the aforementioned barriers have meant that, despite having them lying around, I still haven't made myself eat them. Which means I'm not only not eating them but throwing them out - and I really hate wasting food - though not, apparently, as much as I hate eating vegetables. So I've turned to V8 Juice - the all-vegetable kind, not the mostly-fruit-with-a-bit-of-carrot-thrown-in-so-it-can-be-called-vegetable-juice kind - to ensure that I am getting at least something approaching the RDI of plant matter.
What I'm doing now is taking a 1L carton of V8 Juice to work each Monday and drinking it over the course of the week - this is also because it says on the box that it's supposed to be drunk within 5 days of opening, and that strikes me as reasonable given that vitamins and such do leech out of vegetables over time; juiced-up vegetables are probably no exception.
Yes, it's vile - truly vile; I wince with every mouthful and have to wash my mouth out with water afterwards and follow that with a strong mint. But it's still better (and faster) than eating the damn vegetables and - more importantly - it means I don't have the ghastly things getting in the way of me enjoying my evening meat1.
I've been doing this for nearly two weeks, and I'm reasonably content. I suspect that not getting enough of whatever vegetables are supposed to contain was leading to diminished energy; now that I've upped my intake I think I am less lethargic later in the day. I was going to say that it's also helped boost my colossally useless immune system but it felt the urge to let through something over the weekend and I had Monday off work with low energy and an unceasing headache.
But, as much as my taste buds resent me for it, I'm going to keep at it. I hate the constant minor illnesses - sniffles, coughs and so forth - I'm plagued with, and if doing this cuts that down by even a tiny fraction it's going to be worth it.
Now where did I put those mints?
1That's not a typo.
Influence
ATG review
I don’t have a lot to say that isn’t in the review – though it is a reminder of how much of a challenge casting a show can be, particularly when – as was the case with Influence - the script gives specific references to how old the character is.
Many of the roles I’ve played either haven’t been especially age-specific (A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Much Ado About Nothing, The Taming of the Shrew, Me & My Girl plus anything I’ve been chorus in) or have been described as close enough to the age I was at the time (Emma, The Matchmaker, Lords & Ladies), but in a few I’ve played characters I was probably too young for: Popcorn, The Crucible, and Arsenic & Old Lace.
Obviously it’s a concern for me with Tempest – otherwise I wouldn’t have gone the grow-and-dye-the-beard option mentioned in last week’s entry. But there’s not really a lot I can do about it so it’s going to be down to trusting the audience are capable of the requisite suspension of disbelief.
Iron Man 2
I went to see Iron Man 2 this week. I quite enjoyed the first one – as comic-book adaptations go it was very good – and I trusted the people involved (mostly director Jon Favreau) to not go down the Michael Bay path, i.e. where you just throw a whole bunch of money at the CGI and effects people but get your script written by people who (it seems) he found standing by the side of the road holding up signs reading ‘Will hack for food’.
I really should have found the time to rewatch the first one just so I could make a more informed comparison; perhaps I’ll get hold of it and watch it during my two week Tempest break.
While it wasn’t – as far as I can remember - as good as the first, it wasn’t that far off. They were very good at not making the oh-so-common sequel mistake of deciding to just up the humour level to the point where the sequel seems more like a parody of the original (Michael Bay again - [cough] Bad Boys 2 [cough]) and although they did throw more money at the CGI and effects people, they made sure they had a solid plot and good writing as a framework to build upon.
So there was some excellent, funny dialogue - helps distract from the brain-hurtingly-bad subversions of reality mostly to do with how quickly Stark and co. are able to build all the stuff they build, plus his creation of a 'new element' that's a stable metal – something that I possess enough science-fu to know isn’t actually possible.
Incidentally, the screenplay was written by Justin Theroux, who’s also an actor: he played Evil DJ in Zoolander and Sean O’Grady in Charlies Angels 2, amongst other things. Oh, and he also co-wrote Tropic Thunder – another script I though very highly of.
Robert Downey Jr was excellent, but it wasn’t until I saw an advertisement for the dvd release of Sherlock Holmes that it dawned on me exactly how different he made those two characters – and that only improved my opinion of him.
Scarlett Johansson is hot, especially in a black catsuit. Samuel L Jackson is awesome, even though he didn’t say ‘motherfucker’ (or one of its variants) even once. Lousy US PG-13 rating. Roger Sterling from Mad Men (John Slattery looking disturbingly like Walt Disney) is Tony Stark’s father.
It was full of references to other characters in the Marvel universe - Tony Stark has Captain America's unfinished shield (apparently it was in Iron Man, but I didn't notice it) and uses it to prop up a particle accelerator; in a post-credits sequence (technical name: the stinger) the agent goes to New Mexico and in a crater we see Mjolnir - Thor's hammer.
Thor is the next Marvel film we’ll see – it’s due next year and directed, hilariously enough, by Kenneth Branagh – but the one I’m now really looking forward to is The Avengers, which’ll be directed by (wait for it) Joss Whedon. It’s about damn time someone trusted him with a big project like this. Let’s just hope there isn’t any executive meddling to screw things up.
Vegetables and I don't get along. We really don't. And I've given up buying them because, short of one or two ways - all including the addition of other substances that disguise their awful, awful vegetable taste - I can't eat them.
And I'm also a lazy, lazy person - so cutting/shelling/skinning or whatever the heck else you need to do to vegetables to prepare them is also an annoyance, particularly these days when I'm frequently pressed for time and have to get myself fed before heading out to rehearsal or to whatever other event I may be attending.
In the past I've tried to be good and buy vegetables, but the aforementioned barriers have meant that, despite having them lying around, I still haven't made myself eat them. Which means I'm not only not eating them but throwing them out - and I really hate wasting food - though not, apparently, as much as I hate eating vegetables. So I've turned to V8 Juice - the all-vegetable kind, not the mostly-fruit-with-a-bit-of-carrot-thrown-in-so-it-can-be-called-vegetable-juice kind - to ensure that I am getting at least something approaching the RDI of plant matter.
What I'm doing now is taking a 1L carton of V8 Juice to work each Monday and drinking it over the course of the week - this is also because it says on the box that it's supposed to be drunk within 5 days of opening, and that strikes me as reasonable given that vitamins and such do leech out of vegetables over time; juiced-up vegetables are probably no exception.
Yes, it's vile - truly vile; I wince with every mouthful and have to wash my mouth out with water afterwards and follow that with a strong mint. But it's still better (and faster) than eating the damn vegetables and - more importantly - it means I don't have the ghastly things getting in the way of me enjoying my evening meat1.
I've been doing this for nearly two weeks, and I'm reasonably content. I suspect that not getting enough of whatever vegetables are supposed to contain was leading to diminished energy; now that I've upped my intake I think I am less lethargic later in the day. I was going to say that it's also helped boost my colossally useless immune system but it felt the urge to let through something over the weekend and I had Monday off work with low energy and an unceasing headache.
But, as much as my taste buds resent me for it, I'm going to keep at it. I hate the constant minor illnesses - sniffles, coughs and so forth - I'm plagued with, and if doing this cuts that down by even a tiny fraction it's going to be worth it.
Now where did I put those mints?
1That's not a typo.
Influence
ATG review
I don’t have a lot to say that isn’t in the review – though it is a reminder of how much of a challenge casting a show can be, particularly when – as was the case with Influence - the script gives specific references to how old the character is.
Many of the roles I’ve played either haven’t been especially age-specific (A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Much Ado About Nothing, The Taming of the Shrew, Me & My Girl plus anything I’ve been chorus in) or have been described as close enough to the age I was at the time (Emma, The Matchmaker, Lords & Ladies), but in a few I’ve played characters I was probably too young for: Popcorn, The Crucible, and Arsenic & Old Lace.
Obviously it’s a concern for me with Tempest – otherwise I wouldn’t have gone the grow-and-dye-the-beard option mentioned in last week’s entry. But there’s not really a lot I can do about it so it’s going to be down to trusting the audience are capable of the requisite suspension of disbelief.
Iron Man 2
I went to see Iron Man 2 this week. I quite enjoyed the first one – as comic-book adaptations go it was very good – and I trusted the people involved (mostly director Jon Favreau) to not go down the Michael Bay path, i.e. where you just throw a whole bunch of money at the CGI and effects people but get your script written by people who (it seems) he found standing by the side of the road holding up signs reading ‘Will hack for food’.
I really should have found the time to rewatch the first one just so I could make a more informed comparison; perhaps I’ll get hold of it and watch it during my two week Tempest break.
While it wasn’t – as far as I can remember - as good as the first, it wasn’t that far off. They were very good at not making the oh-so-common sequel mistake of deciding to just up the humour level to the point where the sequel seems more like a parody of the original (Michael Bay again - [cough] Bad Boys 2 [cough]) and although they did throw more money at the CGI and effects people, they made sure they had a solid plot and good writing as a framework to build upon.
So there was some excellent, funny dialogue - helps distract from the brain-hurtingly-bad subversions of reality mostly to do with how quickly Stark and co. are able to build all the stuff they build, plus his creation of a 'new element' that's a stable metal – something that I possess enough science-fu to know isn’t actually possible.
Incidentally, the screenplay was written by Justin Theroux, who’s also an actor: he played Evil DJ in Zoolander and Sean O’Grady in Charlies Angels 2, amongst other things. Oh, and he also co-wrote Tropic Thunder – another script I though very highly of.
Robert Downey Jr was excellent, but it wasn’t until I saw an advertisement for the dvd release of Sherlock Holmes that it dawned on me exactly how different he made those two characters – and that only improved my opinion of him.
Scarlett Johansson is hot, especially in a black catsuit. Samuel L Jackson is awesome, even though he didn’t say ‘motherfucker’ (or one of its variants) even once. Lousy US PG-13 rating. Roger Sterling from Mad Men (John Slattery looking disturbingly like Walt Disney) is Tony Stark’s father.
It was full of references to other characters in the Marvel universe - Tony Stark has Captain America's unfinished shield (apparently it was in Iron Man, but I didn't notice it) and uses it to prop up a particle accelerator; in a post-credits sequence (technical name: the stinger) the agent goes to New Mexico and in a crater we see Mjolnir - Thor's hammer.
Thor is the next Marvel film we’ll see – it’s due next year and directed, hilariously enough, by Kenneth Branagh – but the one I’m now really looking forward to is The Avengers, which’ll be directed by (wait for it) Joss Whedon. It’s about damn time someone trusted him with a big project like this. Let’s just hope there isn’t any executive meddling to screw things up.
Saturday, May 8, 2010
The week that was #13
Yes, I'm resurrecting the weekly recap posts. I'm disgusted with my pathetic efforts over the last few months so I've resolved to be more prolific. For the moment it's just random stuff, but in the next few weeks I'll have Tempest to talk about as well as the likely purchase of a netbook and with it my entry into the world of open-source software operating systems.
Actually, I started writing about Tempest and then realise that's probably better put to use in a big post that covers the whole experience. So, you're going to have to wait to hear more about it - though you can, if you're in Adelaide, come see it. Details are here on the Mixed Salad website.
The puncture party
Sometime last week I noticed the rear tyre on my bike was low so - after a few days of just pumping it up each time I needed to go anywhere; it was obviously only a slow leak that wasn't going to cause me too many problems as long as I didn't have to travel very far, though, being the cautious sort, I tend to carry a pump1 with me just in case - I went through the rather irritating (mostly because of how dirty my hands get) process: taking the wheel off (extra effort required for the rear, since the derailleur mechanism is in the way), levering the tyre aside; stripping out the tube; finding the hole(s) by reinflating the tube, filling a bucket with water, immersing the tube in the water and looking for where the air bubbles are emerging; patching the hole(s) and putting it all back together again.
But it seems to have worked okay - though the real test will be how well it holds up after actually being ridden.
This all took place on Monday night. Tuesday morning it was raining; after a fruitless search in the usual places I remembered my umbrella was in the car so I went to get it - and, in doing so, noticed that the rear right corner of my car was not where it should be, i.e. at the same height above the ground as the rear left corner: my car tyre was flat.
What are the chances? I get maybe one bike tyre puncture a year, but it's been so long since I had a flat car tyre that I suspect I went through an entire car (the Celica) without having to change the wheel - making it maybe eight years since the last time.
I couldn't fix it then and there; I was on my way to catching the bus to work. It wasn't a pressing issue because I didn't have to drive it that evening after finishing work because I was staying in town to go to the movies (more on that later) - but I knew that Wednesday afternoon I'd be going straight out and couldn't leave it until then; I'd have to deal with it after I got home on Tuesday night.
So, once I got home and got changed I set to it. Although it'd been ages since I'd done it, the process is by no means rocket science, and because the car was in the garage2 I didn't have to worry as much about in terms of making sure the jack was properly supported and so forth.
I located all of the relevant bits and pieces - jack, jack handle, tyre iron3, spare tyre - without much difficulty; it did, however, look like none of it had been used before so I could assume that either the previous owner(s) had been lucky and never had a flat or, if they had, they called for help.
Despite the fact my type of car (a Mazda 323 Protégé, which is a small four door sedan) does not, as far as I'm aware, tend to be owned by construction workers, professional arm wrestlers or bodybuilders, the wheel nuts were on so damn tight I came very close to giving up and calling the RAA for assistance - as embarrassing as I knew that would be. I suspect it was only because I had some WD-40 handy that I was able to get the blasted things off without help. After that it was pretty easy.
At the time of writing it's been taken to a tyre place - but I haven't collected it yet so I've no idea what it's going to cost.
1Actually, pumps plural; one standard (for the front) and one French (for the rear) - because for some unknown reason my bike has mismatched valve types, and since this determines the rims (because the valve stems are different diameters), changing would mean buying a whole new wheel, which strikes me as a waste of money.
2Or car-hole, if you aren't a la-di-da Mr French man.
3I'm pretty sure that's not the correct Australian term but a) I don't know what else to call it, and b) it sounds cool.
Growing the beard and dyeing for my art
I've grown a goatee for Tempest, mostly because the character I play has two children, presumably in their teens - and, despite my actually being old enough to have two teenage children (at least by the ages at which people tended to become parents in Shakespeare's time), I don't necessarily look that old - and, more importantly, I don't look that much older than the actor playing my on-stage son.
Hilariously, the term 'grow the beard' is actually an expression used in pop-culture analysis - see the TVTropes page - to describe when something improves in quality; if you can't be bothered following the link (remember, TVTropes can be hazardous to your health) the expression comes from Star Trek: The Next Generation where one of the characters (Commander Riker, played by Jonathan Frakes) starts sporting facial hair at around the same time the show supposedly4 got better.
Dyeing for your art is also a trope, but the meaning is much more obvious, and in this instance it is the aforementioned facial hair that’s been coloured for theatrical purposes.
I have to do this because my facial hair – at least some of it – is so pale in colour that it’s almost translucent5. Which isn’t, in and of itself, a problem; it’s just that when I need people to actually see it that it becomes an issue.
Last time I had to grow the beard and colour it (for my role as Karl Brezner in Popcorn) I went down the slightly less permanent path of brushing through some kind of makeup (mascara?) to darken it. But I had to wash that out every night, which was kind of annoying – plus there’s a scene in Tempest that calls for my character to be splashed with water, which might have cause problems for water-soluble makeup.
So, I’ve gone the dye option. Tracking down a product was not as difficult as I’d first imagined; there are actually several brands, most of them aimed at covering grey. So, I hit the pharmacy and grabbed a box of Light Brown.
Facial-hair-dyeing scientists have obviously been working very hard because the process is very simple: combine gunk from two tubes, smoosh them together and brush through the thing you want coloured and after an appropriate time, wash it out.
It seems to have worked okay: the hair is noticeably darker, but not so much that it looks like it isn’t natural. I’ll have to do a slightly more thorough job prior to the show opening, but that’s okay; it’s another three weeks until we open, and by then I’ll be in need of a trim anyway so I’ll clean it up and colour it again so it’s at its best for the run.
4No, I’m not just saying that because I don’t want you to know that I secretly watch Star Trek TNG in secret – I admit to much worse – it’s that I honestly haven’t ever watched it.
5It’s also oddly coarse, particularly the moustache part. I suspect I could make a living trimming it and selling it to people to make nail brushes.
Beneath Hill 60
This week’s cinematic experience was Beneath Hill 60, a film about a contingent of Australian sappers on the front lines in Europe during WWI.
What’s a sapper? Good question. According to Wikipedia they’re the military’s mining and excavation engineers and they’ve been doing their darndest to help their sides win wars for over two and a half thousand years, mostly by using their digging skills to bring down an enemy’s fortifications.
And it wasn’t all that much different in WWI. Since the two sides were situated at ‘the front’, with forces gathered either side of a ‘no man’s land’, battles usually consisted of one side deciding to charge at the other in the hope of pushing the other side back. If a side could find a way to make that push more successful then it’d increase the chances of success and – though it didn’t always seem like a priority – save a lot of people’s lives.
Well, people on the side charging at least.
Anyway, what the Australian sappers were doing was, in unison with other sapper units all along the front, digging underneath the enemy lines and planting explosive charges so that, when they were aware that the enemy troops had gathered in sufficient numbers, they’d detonate the explosives and kill a vast number of them.
The film is centered around this, all from the perspective of one Australian, Captain Oliver Woodward (played by Brendan Cowell) and includes some of his back story, including his relationship with a family who’d lost a member to the war.
It’s a bit slow to start off with, but once the unit travel to the eponymous Hill 60 (which was in Belgium) the tension starts to build and it develops into a really engrossing film. The dialogue is a bit grating at times – it just sounds unnatural, at least to me – and some of the more dramatic moments struck me as having been thrown in to add ‘human interest’.
But I enjoyed it6, and it was a great history lesson. Plus they also didn’t gloss over the impact or try to glorify war; there were scenes of mutilated and shell-shocked soldiers at the front, as well as a characters obviously suffering PTSD in a scene set after the war was over.
On a vaguely related note, it was directed by Jeremy Sims – which, since I saw a production of The Wild Duck directed by him a few years back, means it’s the first movie I’ve seen directed by someone who has also directed a play I’ve seen.
6It did, however, have Gyton Grantley in it; not that I mind him that much, but I really dislike the combination of weird given name and alliteration. It just irks me.
The dreaded head shot
One of the aspects of theatre I dread the most became necessary this week: having my photo taken for the program/foyer. The reason it is so loathéd7 is because, thanks to my poor (or, as I like to put it, non-existent) bone structure, my face does not take well to having one of its dimensions removed and the resulting image is almost always one that I dislike immensely.
Put it this way: I don't really like the shape of my face at the best of times, but I can live with it; when it's in a photo, though, it looks fat and flat and weird and huge8 and I hate not only having to see it myself whenever I enter a foyer/read a program/look at a webpage, but that other people see it as well.
Really, if I could enforce it I'd never let anyone take a photo of me, ever. But that's not really an option since there are always theatre programs and ID badges and driver's licenses and so forth; my freakish two-dimensional melon will always be there to be seen .
Anyway, these particular head shots were being taken by a professional, so at least I had that in my favour. Still, professionals at least realise exactly how much of a challenge they face when they struggle against the combination of physiology and the laws of physics and try to find ways around it - however, unlike amateurs, they aren't just going to shrug and say 'fuck it' and just go with what they've already got after spending twenty minutes adjusting the lights while I try to find the one good (as opposed to the nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine bad) facial expression that keeps me from looking like either an overly-cheerful serial killer or the poorly-reanimated corpse of someone very surly.
Making it worse was the fact that the other cast members started showing up. This served to make me even more nervous about the process since my inability to produce something worth shooting would now be inconveniencing others as well.
Given the choice I'd rather have been in a dentist's chair.
But he managed to get a couple that he liked - or, at least, was content with. I didn't ask to see them because I probably would have hated them; he'd have noticed and then made me sit back down again to keep trying to get one I was okay with, and everyone would have been sitting around for even longer wondering why the bloody hell it was taking so long.
Part of me is optimistic, though. It's not impossible for there to be photos of me I don't immediately want to set fire to - it's just not very likely. Still, there's really not a lot I can do about it.
7That's right, loathéd. I'm kicking it old school.
8Okay, fatter, flatter, weirder and huger.
Actually, I started writing about Tempest and then realise that's probably better put to use in a big post that covers the whole experience. So, you're going to have to wait to hear more about it - though you can, if you're in Adelaide, come see it. Details are here on the Mixed Salad website.
The puncture party
Sometime last week I noticed the rear tyre on my bike was low so - after a few days of just pumping it up each time I needed to go anywhere; it was obviously only a slow leak that wasn't going to cause me too many problems as long as I didn't have to travel very far, though, being the cautious sort, I tend to carry a pump1 with me just in case - I went through the rather irritating (mostly because of how dirty my hands get) process: taking the wheel off (extra effort required for the rear, since the derailleur mechanism is in the way), levering the tyre aside; stripping out the tube; finding the hole(s) by reinflating the tube, filling a bucket with water, immersing the tube in the water and looking for where the air bubbles are emerging; patching the hole(s) and putting it all back together again.
But it seems to have worked okay - though the real test will be how well it holds up after actually being ridden.
This all took place on Monday night. Tuesday morning it was raining; after a fruitless search in the usual places I remembered my umbrella was in the car so I went to get it - and, in doing so, noticed that the rear right corner of my car was not where it should be, i.e. at the same height above the ground as the rear left corner: my car tyre was flat.
What are the chances? I get maybe one bike tyre puncture a year, but it's been so long since I had a flat car tyre that I suspect I went through an entire car (the Celica) without having to change the wheel - making it maybe eight years since the last time.
I couldn't fix it then and there; I was on my way to catching the bus to work. It wasn't a pressing issue because I didn't have to drive it that evening after finishing work because I was staying in town to go to the movies (more on that later) - but I knew that Wednesday afternoon I'd be going straight out and couldn't leave it until then; I'd have to deal with it after I got home on Tuesday night.
So, once I got home and got changed I set to it. Although it'd been ages since I'd done it, the process is by no means rocket science, and because the car was in the garage2 I didn't have to worry as much about in terms of making sure the jack was properly supported and so forth.
I located all of the relevant bits and pieces - jack, jack handle, tyre iron3, spare tyre - without much difficulty; it did, however, look like none of it had been used before so I could assume that either the previous owner(s) had been lucky and never had a flat or, if they had, they called for help.
Despite the fact my type of car (a Mazda 323 Protégé, which is a small four door sedan) does not, as far as I'm aware, tend to be owned by construction workers, professional arm wrestlers or bodybuilders, the wheel nuts were on so damn tight I came very close to giving up and calling the RAA for assistance - as embarrassing as I knew that would be. I suspect it was only because I had some WD-40 handy that I was able to get the blasted things off without help. After that it was pretty easy.
At the time of writing it's been taken to a tyre place - but I haven't collected it yet so I've no idea what it's going to cost.
1Actually, pumps plural; one standard (for the front) and one French (for the rear) - because for some unknown reason my bike has mismatched valve types, and since this determines the rims (because the valve stems are different diameters), changing would mean buying a whole new wheel, which strikes me as a waste of money.
2Or car-hole, if you aren't a la-di-da Mr French man.
3I'm pretty sure that's not the correct Australian term but a) I don't know what else to call it, and b) it sounds cool.
Growing the beard and dyeing for my art
I've grown a goatee for Tempest, mostly because the character I play has two children, presumably in their teens - and, despite my actually being old enough to have two teenage children (at least by the ages at which people tended to become parents in Shakespeare's time), I don't necessarily look that old - and, more importantly, I don't look that much older than the actor playing my on-stage son.
Hilariously, the term 'grow the beard' is actually an expression used in pop-culture analysis - see the TVTropes page - to describe when something improves in quality; if you can't be bothered following the link (remember, TVTropes can be hazardous to your health) the expression comes from Star Trek: The Next Generation where one of the characters (Commander Riker, played by Jonathan Frakes) starts sporting facial hair at around the same time the show supposedly4 got better.
Dyeing for your art is also a trope, but the meaning is much more obvious, and in this instance it is the aforementioned facial hair that’s been coloured for theatrical purposes.
I have to do this because my facial hair – at least some of it – is so pale in colour that it’s almost translucent5. Which isn’t, in and of itself, a problem; it’s just that when I need people to actually see it that it becomes an issue.
Last time I had to grow the beard and colour it (for my role as Karl Brezner in Popcorn) I went down the slightly less permanent path of brushing through some kind of makeup (mascara?) to darken it. But I had to wash that out every night, which was kind of annoying – plus there’s a scene in Tempest that calls for my character to be splashed with water, which might have cause problems for water-soluble makeup.
So, I’ve gone the dye option. Tracking down a product was not as difficult as I’d first imagined; there are actually several brands, most of them aimed at covering grey. So, I hit the pharmacy and grabbed a box of Light Brown.
Facial-hair-dyeing scientists have obviously been working very hard because the process is very simple: combine gunk from two tubes, smoosh them together and brush through the thing you want coloured and after an appropriate time, wash it out.
It seems to have worked okay: the hair is noticeably darker, but not so much that it looks like it isn’t natural. I’ll have to do a slightly more thorough job prior to the show opening, but that’s okay; it’s another three weeks until we open, and by then I’ll be in need of a trim anyway so I’ll clean it up and colour it again so it’s at its best for the run.
4No, I’m not just saying that because I don’t want you to know that I secretly watch Star Trek TNG in secret – I admit to much worse – it’s that I honestly haven’t ever watched it.
5It’s also oddly coarse, particularly the moustache part. I suspect I could make a living trimming it and selling it to people to make nail brushes.
Beneath Hill 60
This week’s cinematic experience was Beneath Hill 60, a film about a contingent of Australian sappers on the front lines in Europe during WWI.
What’s a sapper? Good question. According to Wikipedia they’re the military’s mining and excavation engineers and they’ve been doing their darndest to help their sides win wars for over two and a half thousand years, mostly by using their digging skills to bring down an enemy’s fortifications.
And it wasn’t all that much different in WWI. Since the two sides were situated at ‘the front’, with forces gathered either side of a ‘no man’s land’, battles usually consisted of one side deciding to charge at the other in the hope of pushing the other side back. If a side could find a way to make that push more successful then it’d increase the chances of success and – though it didn’t always seem like a priority – save a lot of people’s lives.
Well, people on the side charging at least.
Anyway, what the Australian sappers were doing was, in unison with other sapper units all along the front, digging underneath the enemy lines and planting explosive charges so that, when they were aware that the enemy troops had gathered in sufficient numbers, they’d detonate the explosives and kill a vast number of them.
The film is centered around this, all from the perspective of one Australian, Captain Oliver Woodward (played by Brendan Cowell) and includes some of his back story, including his relationship with a family who’d lost a member to the war.
It’s a bit slow to start off with, but once the unit travel to the eponymous Hill 60 (which was in Belgium) the tension starts to build and it develops into a really engrossing film. The dialogue is a bit grating at times – it just sounds unnatural, at least to me – and some of the more dramatic moments struck me as having been thrown in to add ‘human interest’.
But I enjoyed it6, and it was a great history lesson. Plus they also didn’t gloss over the impact or try to glorify war; there were scenes of mutilated and shell-shocked soldiers at the front, as well as a characters obviously suffering PTSD in a scene set after the war was over.
On a vaguely related note, it was directed by Jeremy Sims – which, since I saw a production of The Wild Duck directed by him a few years back, means it’s the first movie I’ve seen directed by someone who has also directed a play I’ve seen.
6It did, however, have Gyton Grantley in it; not that I mind him that much, but I really dislike the combination of weird given name and alliteration. It just irks me.
The dreaded head shot
One of the aspects of theatre I dread the most became necessary this week: having my photo taken for the program/foyer. The reason it is so loathéd7 is because, thanks to my poor (or, as I like to put it, non-existent) bone structure, my face does not take well to having one of its dimensions removed and the resulting image is almost always one that I dislike immensely.
Put it this way: I don't really like the shape of my face at the best of times, but I can live with it; when it's in a photo, though, it looks fat and flat and weird and huge8 and I hate not only having to see it myself whenever I enter a foyer/read a program/look at a webpage, but that other people see it as well.
Really, if I could enforce it I'd never let anyone take a photo of me, ever. But that's not really an option since there are always theatre programs and ID badges and driver's licenses and so forth; my freakish two-dimensional melon will always be there to be seen .
Anyway, these particular head shots were being taken by a professional, so at least I had that in my favour. Still, professionals at least realise exactly how much of a challenge they face when they struggle against the combination of physiology and the laws of physics and try to find ways around it - however, unlike amateurs, they aren't just going to shrug and say 'fuck it' and just go with what they've already got after spending twenty minutes adjusting the lights while I try to find the one good (as opposed to the nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine bad) facial expression that keeps me from looking like either an overly-cheerful serial killer or the poorly-reanimated corpse of someone very surly.
Making it worse was the fact that the other cast members started showing up. This served to make me even more nervous about the process since my inability to produce something worth shooting would now be inconveniencing others as well.
Given the choice I'd rather have been in a dentist's chair.
But he managed to get a couple that he liked - or, at least, was content with. I didn't ask to see them because I probably would have hated them; he'd have noticed and then made me sit back down again to keep trying to get one I was okay with, and everyone would have been sitting around for even longer wondering why the bloody hell it was taking so long.
Part of me is optimistic, though. It's not impossible for there to be photos of me I don't immediately want to set fire to - it's just not very likely. Still, there's really not a lot I can do about it.
7That's right, loathéd. I'm kicking it old school.
8Okay, fatter, flatter, weirder and huger.
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