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kinesthetic chutzpah's LiveJournal:
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| Friday, May 4th, 2012 | | 1:26 pm |
hulk smash puny god
is there a word for varying the intensity of something in an artistic presentation in order to change the implications and emphasis of certain parts? i feel like there must be but i'm not coming up with it. other than, i dunno, "contrast." the specific application in comedy i'm thinking of is where one character gives a bombastic, loud, urgent speech and another character replies in a mild, offhand conversational tone, and the conversation switches to that register for a little while before switching back to scenery-chewing. or other variations in rapidly switching intensity and tone like that. anyway. the new "avengers" movie does that really well in a bunch of places, and has generally good comic timing in a bunch of places, and generally mixes things up really well for a story that's basically about characters whose powers are "being strong," "being really strong," and "being really really strong." or, in a few places, "being able to hack your computer," "no, being able to hack your computer," and "no, being able to hack your computer"-- the entire screenplay is filled with testosterone-fueled one-upsmanship games of all kinds which nevertheless manage to continue to seem compelling at the time. and, that said, black widow gets to be cooler than she was in the iron man movies. | | Thursday, May 3rd, 2012 | | 1:42 pm |
this is why people used to be afraid of bards
cute story about a guy having a customer service dispute with united airlines: united breaks guitarsshort version: singer/songwriter gets his $3500 guitar damaged in checked luggage, spends months trying to get the airline to compensate him, they blow him off. so he puts up a youtube video. and he's a songwriter. he can make a compelling youtube video. it gets 11 million hits, and united's stock drops 10 points, about $180 million dollars. also the guitar maker sends him two new guitars for the publicity. | | Wednesday, April 25th, 2012 | | 10:49 pm |
the cape
fitting the pattern of cheesy sci-fi or fantasy shows that only had one season, ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif?v=92.2) moominmolly and i have been watching the cape, a street-level superhero show, on netflix. it has a lot of fun features. the hero is trained by villains! specifically, by a villainous circus. the circus's top hand to hand fighter is a midget (probably the second best midget role in current tv). in one episode, we get to see summer glau on aerial silks. :) the series villain has multiple personalities... and both of them are psychopaths. (making it apparent that being a psychopath really has nothing to do with his having multiple personalities, which i think is pretty unusual for a portrayal of multiple personalities in popular media...) | | Sunday, March 4th, 2012 | | 7:27 pm |
the street of the lifted lorax
saw the new lorax movie. cute bokeh for an entirely-animated film... also, acceptably cyberpunk, for dr seuss's most cyberpunk book. there's a romantic subplot i don't seem to recall from the original, but i think all movies are required to have one by some secretive guild or something. | | Thursday, February 23rd, 2012 | | 5:45 pm |
tomorrow night's show is sold out!
i'd say "you heard it here first" but apparently dancingwolfgrrl beat me to posting about it in my own journal. ;) nevertheless, if you want to see bohemian bacchanalia and you haven't yet bought tickets, come tonight! | | 9:33 am |
| | Monday, February 20th, 2012 | | 4:33 pm |
bohemian bacchanalia! this thursday and friday!
i'm going to be in this show this weekend. if you've seen a lot of boston circus guild performances, this show is heavily weighted towards acts you haven't seen. i'm personally a little intimidated by the rest of the lineup! but i'll be there both nights, on bouncy stilts. :) here's the blurb from the link above: Enter a world of debauchery, drunken revelry, and wild and mystical festivities! The Bacchanalia is back with new performers, new acts, and a new band! Enjoy the soul stylings of Johnny Blazes and the Pretty Boys and dance along to the vivaciousness of Emperor Norton's Stationary Marching Band. For two magical evenings you are invited to come experience some of the most talented artists in New England, including aerialists, jugglers, dancers & burlesque performers. Come for the carousing and merrymaking and have a sexy, uproarious good time! Last year’s event sold out so get your tickets today!if y'all are local, come by, it'll be fun. :) | | Saturday, February 18th, 2012 | | 10:37 pm |
silks class at esh aerial arts: "manpretty"
omg am i going to hurt tomorrow. since i occasionally post here about interest in exploring the space of male presentation in performance, it probably won't be surprising that this workshop description at esh aerial arts appealed to me: ManPretty with T Lawrence-Simon
Saturday, February 18th
2:30 - 5:00 pm, $50
Is there a difference between pretty and feminine? Is there a difference between strong and masculine? How do you combine the best of both worlds into your work as a man in the air? Solution – “ManPretty!”of course i am hella out of shape for silks right now. the last time i went to practice i was appalled at how weak i was; and i've skipped the next two practices since then. soo... i was pleased to be able to get through the class without dying; but i was definitely shot by the end. and now every part of my body aches except, weirdly, my hands. apparently my abs, in particular, need a lot of work. most of the class was simply about good form (or crazy stretching or conditioning excercises), which of course is itself of use to me. and, i learned a new climb. :) and a new setup for the groin-grabber dive; and an exercise that incorporated frobzwiththingz's "barrel roll" entry into the ramon wrap. the gendered-performance bits were about experimenting with hollow-body and pike type positions-- with butts tucked under-- in places where one often sees shoulders thrown back and open, possibly backs arched and/or butts out. and a general note to choose things in performance that look good with your body and play to your strengths (while training to remove your weaknesses). tonight i'm pleasantly sore. but i'm a little bit dreading waking up... | | Monday, February 13th, 2012 | | 6:08 pm |
| | Tuesday, February 7th, 2012 | | 7:54 pm |
day 6 of this cold
sudafed helps. being on a plane did not. when i sniffle deeply, my head explodes. trying not to breathe too much while bolting it back together. i'm sure this has nothing to do with those immune-suppressing drugs i'm on. | | 2:13 pm |
the succubus trope
i wouldn't have thought of... well, at least this particular variant... as a specific media trope until quite recently. but... you know how rogue, the x-men character, in both the comic and the movie, had this thing where she couldn't kiss anyone because she couldn't turn off her powers, which worked by touch, which would essentially suck out their soul? it was always a part of her character that she was vaguely grumpy about this, though maybe not quite as extremely grumpy as one might think she'd have the right to be (the movies did make some mileage out of it). so netflix has been picking up a lot of not-renewed-for-a-second-season tv shows lately and as part of our quest to watch all the cheesy supernatural tv shows ever moominmolly and i recently ran across the show "the gates," about a gated community that turns out to mostly be inhabited by vampires and werewolves and other supernatural beings who mostly would like to be left alone and not hunted by pitchfork-wielding mobs, etc. actually the best character was a stereotypical bored-housewife-with-a-drinking-problem whose drinking problem was that she would occasionally slip up and drain all the blood out of, say, the gardener, and then have to hide the body from the neighbors and her husband, etc. but one of the other characters was a teenaged girl whose mother, unbeknownst to her, had been a succubus, and so at adolescence she inherited her mom's supernatural nature and so could never be with, or even make out with, the young man she was falling for because her touch would kill him, cue endless teen angst. but then the very next cheesy supernatural cancelled-after-one-season show we watched, the nine lives of chloe king, turned out to star the same actress... once again playing a girl who discovers on her 16th birthday that she's actually the descendant of a line of supernatural beings (in this case, cat people-- vaguely reminiscent of the '70's movie of that name) whose power is such that they cannot kiss a human without magically killing him or her. (also they all know parkour.) i kind of wonder if this actress has trouble getting people to make out with her at cast parties. and i was wondering where she'd find another role as a supernatural being whose intimate touch kills mortals, doomed never to be with the one she loves... and then jojotbird pointed me to legend of the seeker. this series is based on a series of books by terry goodkind. and in the succubus role, here called "confessor," has a different actress. but again, well, she cannot (in moments of passion) fully control her supernatural power to suck the souls from mortals she touches, and so can never be with the one she loves. i mean, i guess the trope just is from the succubus legend, and that's why it's always women with this unfortunate power. (nevermind that succubus stories aren't actually gender limited in that way; but you don't hear the word "incubus" nearly as much.) but i wonder why it's so common all of a sudden? | | 1:48 pm |
whatever season this is
i feel like i should post something here about my grandmother's funeral, except i'm not really sure what to say except that alzheimers, though awful, is probably easier on relatives at the funeral than more-sudden ways of dying. i've had years to get used to grandma being gone, while she was still here. still, i'm glad the baby boomers are spending so very much money looking for a cure. also, it is spring in georgia. daffodils are blooming, and dandelions have already gone to seed. i'm a little surprised to read any accounts of groundhog day in which the groundhog didn't come out surrounded by a glowing nimbus of light. | | Thursday, January 26th, 2012 | | 5:18 pm |
starting to worry about open source code
sure, if you don't have data on a conversion rate for a particular currency, it's probably fine to silently assume it trades with the euro at 1:1, instead of throwing an error. it's just money, right? people don't get very picky about money. | | Tuesday, January 24th, 2012 | | 9:05 pm |
thought of the day
in the wake of the sopa/pipa fight and the takedown of megaupload, i've seen (finally!) occasional mentions of the fact that each instance of illegal file sharing represents a crime, but not every instance represents a loss to the copyright holder. which means that even if they were based on real data, industry estimates of losses due to piracy would be wildly inflated. this much always seemed obvious to me from my dim memories of econ 101: different people are willing to pay different prices for a product. if someone takes an illegal copy, that is only a loss to the seller if they'd otherwise have been willing to buy it at the seller's asking price. today i remembered that econ 101 also talked about a way to deal with different buyers having different prices they'd pay: price discrimination. find a way to charge different customers different prices, based on what they're willing to pay. if you're a merchant in some ancient bazaar you can just haggle with each customer until you suss out their demand curve, but modern methods are generally cruder. but, what if riaa/mpaa et al were attempting (i don't really think they are) a further development of this idea? identify everyone who wants your product but isn't willing to pay your highest asking price, and sue them for the full price anyway? it's kind of brilliant. :) | | Monday, January 2nd, 2012 | | 12:18 pm |
happy new year!
for january 1st this year i got finessed into running in a 5k race. :) moominmolly talked me into signing up, and we were going to go through the couch-to-5k training program, but then even that proved too aggressive for her ankles right now, so we stopped. but in the meantime jojotbird had also signed up, along with her brother and his s.o... so... encouragingly, jojotbird hadn't trained either. on the other hand, she ran track in high school. i played d&d. (yes, i've sort of discovered physical fitness since then. but i'm kind of in a slump right now. also running has never been my thing.) anyway she was very encouraging and alleged that the snail's pace that i could maintain was actually the pace she was planning to go at anyway, etc. :) of course, that pace left her with a sprint at the end, so the photos moominmolly took at the finish line have her looking all speedy, while i look like i'm kind of ambling (until just across the finish line, when i staggered over to the water table and then spent the next 15 minutes trying to keep my legs from completely seizing up). so somehow i (we both) wound up actually running the entire distance, literally the farthest i've ever run at one stretch. i didn't actually check the exact time they recorded for me (despite all the adorable technology that went into recording it-- rfid ftw), but it was something a little under 36 minutes, which i can certainly live with since i was mainly aiming to beat 50:00. and i'm mostly able to walk today! so, a fine start to the year. :) | | Thursday, November 24th, 2011 | | 8:27 pm |
| | Wednesday, November 23rd, 2011 | | 10:31 pm |
then they came for the reporters
the most alarming thing i can recall seeing so far related to the "occupy" protests, which i've been following only vaguely, was that police during one of the early evictions-- oakland? seattle? i don't remember where, and can't seem to find references to it now-- told the press to go away... and they did. in any case it's nice to see at last (via friends' retweets) an article in the actual new york times suggesting that the nypd should stop beating reporters please, etc. but since it's been widely reported that police banned even news helicopters from covering the occupy wall street eviction, i've been wondering why every newspaper in new york wasn't wall to wall editorials raging at such crazy, literally police-state tactics. it's not that i expect, this year in the u.s., for police in a major city to chase away reporters to evade blame for, say, opening fire on a crowd. the incidents that people have been rightly angry about have still been, at least, inappropriate/excessive use of weapons designed to not kill people. but i figure the relevant part really is agents of the government trying to conceal what they're doing because they feel guilty about it-- as far as i'm concerned that should always be a red flag, regardless of what it is that's actually being concealed. i figure government desire for secrecy should always be met with a rebuttable presumption of bad faith. apparently the "closing the airspace" story is a little murkier than it sounded at first-- i'm not impressed by the nypd claiming innocence on the grounds that they don't have the authority to close airspace, because that doesn't actually prevent them from acting as if they do, it just makes it worse; but if the whole thing was the result of a miscommunication between the nypd and one pilot and none of the networks bothered to check whether the police had that authority... well, i'm pretty sad about the supine state of our news media. here's a slightly cheerier bit along those lines, at least. | | Wednesday, November 9th, 2011 | | 10:17 am |
| | Wednesday, October 19th, 2011 | | 2:44 pm |
| | Friday, October 14th, 2011 | | 9:39 am |
thing i'm chuckling over this morning
link from a link from the recent iteration of the ongoing eternal thread about women in superhero comics: men-ups, a set of photos of men dressed in traditionally masculine clothing surrounded by traditionally masculine iconography but posed in traditional female pin-up poses. a thing that strikes me about them: i think it isn't the gross body positions that convey the interesting impact; i think all of these poses could be altered to look strong and masculine, instead of vulnerable and feminine, by changing how they hold their hands and sometimes feet, and not arching the back. (presumably they're arching their backs to thrust out their breasts and butts?) it might be interesting to play with the spectrum of nuances that could be conveyed with minor changes. though maybe less deliberately socially jarring. |
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