A reader wrote with an interesting question. They’re planning on going to see a play this month–Robert Lepage’s “The Blue Dragon”, and wondered “do I go to opening night? I’m sure they had months to rehearse, but maybe there’s jitters?”
And here’s what I said. If you’re looking for the best artistic experience, I wouldn’t go on opening night. There are always jitters among the performers, and that can result in an uneven or less nuanced performance. Also–this is particularly the case with Lepage’s highly-complex work–the risk of a technical issue declines with each performance. Last year, I know somebody who attended an opening night at the Belfry Theatre in Victoria and the lighting basically failed. The very-professional actress had to do her entire one-woman show under house lights.
I’d also avoid the closing night show, for some of the same reasons. The ideal show might be a Friday night in the second-half of the run. There are often matinees on Saturday, and I figure the actors may be pacing themselves to handle the demands of doing the show twice in the same day.
I’m going to see that Lepage play this month as well, and I’m pretty psyched. What night do you like to go to a play?
The trouser-rubbing hordes of Macolytes are all in a lather about Apple’s newest device: the oddly-named iPad (insert menstrual humour here). If you haven’t seen it yet, watch the introductory video. It features the usual legion of starry-eyed, breathless Apple senior staff speaking reverently about their newest saint.
It’s a big, thin iPod. And it’s dead sexy. And surprisingly cheap, with prices starting at US $499.
It looks like a cool toy, but which of my computing, communications or entertainment problems does this device actually solve? It’s a sexier Kindle (with, no doubt, the same level of vendor lock-in)–a cool-looking reading device, for newspapers, books and the Web. I’ve been pretty ambivalent about the Kindle and other ebook readers up to now. I’ll probably buy one eventually, but I find I have an affection for the analog reading experience of dead tree books and New Yorker magazines.
And I don’t sit down to ‘read the Internet’. My ‘web surfing’ experience, if you will, is this mix of reading, blogging, tweeting, sending emails and chatting online, and all of that is usually intermingled with my doing actual work. The iPad looks to be great for reading the web, but worse than a laptop for each of these other functions.
I do watch TV and, rarely, feature-length movies on my laptop. I’m usually either on a plane or in bed. In either case, I appreciate the fact that my laptop can sit all on its own, without me holding it up. I know there will be docks and sundry other, uh, mounts for the iPad, but I’m not sure how else it would be superior to my MacBook Air.
In short, it’s a great-looking device, but I’m not sure it’s right for me. What are your initial impressions?
One of the undervalued aspects of the Internet is its endless capacity to enable nostalgia. Whether you had a childhood love of My Little Pony, Dungeons & Dragons or a defunct hockey team, there’s a website (and probably an eBay auction) where you can revisit that pleasure of your youth.
I was reminded of this phenomenon over the weekend, when a friend and I were discussing a new Olympics-themed video game called Vancouver 2010. Like many Olympics computer games before it, it enables you to play a number of the sports from the Winter Games. Here’s a trailer:
It’s noteworthy that the Games’ three sports that are most popular among Canadians–ice hockey, figure skating and curling–don’t appear in this game. It’s not surprising–hockey has its own franchise games, figure skating would be tricky to program effectively (imagine the control scheme) and curling, well, is curling. That said, I think curling would make a great game for the Wii.
The Heady Days of Microsoft Decathlon
My friend reminded me of a slightly earlier sports mini-games-within-a-game for the PC. It was called Microsoft Decathlon, and, believe it or not, it was published in 1982. 1982! The first version of PC-DOS, on which is ran, was only released in August, 1981. I probably didn’t play the game until 1984 or 1985, but I played it a lot. When I watched this video, the sense of nostalgia was visceral:
The crazy midi theme, the four colour interface, the high jump mat labeled “FOAM PIT”–it all came back to me. The whole video is 10 minutes, so don’t bother watching the whole thing. I might draw your attention, however, to the awesome rendering of the shot-put event.
When you compare those two videos, it’s a little shocking how far games have come in 25 years. What will they look like in another 25 years? How much will innovation slow down, as has happened in television and film?
For many British Columbians, the words ‘Haida Gwaii’ speak of mystery. The words mean ‘Islands of the People’, and refer to the misty, cold Queen Charlotte Islands on BC’s coast. They’re familiar to most of us from Emily Carr’s paintings, if nothing else.
The Haida Gwaii is the backdrop for Bruce Ruddell’s “Beyond Eden”. The musical premiered last Thursday at the Vancouver Playhouse, one of the many events of the Cultural Olympiad. Here’s the plot summary:
In the abandoned Haida village of Ninstints stand totem poles. They have stood there for decades. Lewis Wilson and his long-time friend and colleague Max Tomson are on an expedition to rescue these totem poles and save them from their waterlogged, beetle-infested and fragile condition. On their journey both men struggle: Wilson with his authority and resistance to removing the poles; Max to find his place between the white world and his Haida ancestry.
The play is based on actual events. A young Bill Reid–bound to become a famed sculptor–made the actual trip in 1957.
Clever Projections and Inoffensive Songs
Director Dennis Garnhum and set designer Bretta Gerecke cleverly realize this world–the deck of a ship and the trees of Haidi Gwaii–through crisscrossing ramps, intersected by huge timbers that reach into the theatre’s fly tower. They make excellent use of projections, both to simply establish location and, in the more mystical scenes, to evoke mood. During one song–”Carving”, I think–the Haida totems are brought back to life through tricky use of animated projections, a technique which so often goes wrong in contemporary theatre.
The cast is mostly strong, with John Mann (yes, of Spirit of the West fame) and Jennifer Lines (a former UVic classmate of mine) standing out. There were some opening night jitters, and a little clunkiness from some of the chorus members, but Mann’s performance carries us through the meandering storyline.
It’s hard to write one good song, let alone fifteen. The music was unremarkable and, for the most part, inoffensive. A few days later, I find I can still hum the tune from the title song, so that’s something. More interesting was the a capella First Nations music–it’s a form you usually don’t hear outside of tourist traps and documentaries.
Though the play is set in 1957, the script is oddly free of period slang or more than a few token cultural references. Elvis is mentioned a couple of times, but that’s the extent of it. I was also thrown by phrases like “I get that” and “is there a problem here?” which have a much more modern feel to them.
Reid’s Work Makes a Strong Case
The play’s central question–should the characters take and preserve these totems or leave them to rot?–seems at first like a question ripe for debate. In his director’s notes, Garnhum refers to “the true cost of the removal of the [sic] Totem Poles”. While the village where the totems stand has long since been abandoned, the play’s Haidi characters demand that the totems should be left in their rightful spot, to decay and be reclaimed by the forest, as has occurred for thousands of years. However, there will be no new poles to replace the old ones. As the play points out, that cycle has been broken.
At the same time, the Bill Reid character–born of a Haida mother, both in the play and in real life–wants to take and preserve the poles so that he can learn from them. He says, “When I am ready, I will raise a pole of my own. And another and another.” Of course, Reid turned out to be an extraordinary artist and preserver of Haida culture (I count his Raven and the First Man as one of my favourite pieces of Canadian art). From the year 2010, Reid’s accomplishments since taken the poles are incredibly convincing evidence in support of his decision.
“Beyond Eden” isn’t without its cliches. Growing up on the West Coast, I got exposed to a lot of First Nations-themed art. I’ve seen plenty of magical realist plays where there’s some raven or eagle or muskrat who wears a goofy costume and dances around the stage prophesying and telling fables. “Beyond Eden” has ‘The Watchman’, clad in Haida regalia, who serves a similar purpose. Plus, the play name checks the familiar injustices the white man inflicted upon the Haida–residential schools, banned potlatches and small pox.
They’re familiar stories, capably told. I’d probably discourage my more cynical Vancouver friends from attending. On the other hand–and this seems to be the litmus test, in light of the Olympics–I’d probably recommend the production to out-of-towners who didn’t know this part of our province’s history.
It is so Canadian that, when the world comes to visit, we trot out our historical misdeeds for their entertainment. It’s an impulse that both frustrates and delights me.
“Beyond Eden” runs through February 6. You can watch a trailer for the show on the Playhouse’s website.
I recently sent off this note to Cinemark Holdings Inc., the corporation that operates Cinemark Tinseltown here in Vancouver, along with nearly 5000 other theatres in North and Central America.
To whom it may concern,
This weekend, I planned to attend a movie at your Vancouver cinema, Cinemark Tinseltown, with three of my friends. Wanting to ensure that we got tickets, I planned to purchase them on your website. During this process, I noticed that Cinemark charges a $1.00 service charge per ticket when I buy them online.
At a $12 ticket price, that works out to an 8% premium. This surprised me, as it surely costs your organization much less money to sell me an online ticket–you incur no staffing or printing costs–than to sell me one in person. In an ideal world, all of your patrons would buy their tickets at home. Why, then, are you charging me extra to make your life easier?
Your ludicrous service fee convinced my friends and I to attend a film at a Cineplex theatre instead. They charge no service fees for online ticket purchases. I was delighted to give them my money. Can you guess where I’ll spend my movie-going dollars in the future?
I’ve written before about our apartment composter. I wish my family had one when I was young, because watching the accelerated process of decay would have delighted the eight-year-old Darren. I’m still a little amazed that I can dump, say, some old lettuce into the thing and, 24 hours later, it’s magically turned into dirt.
The device hasn’t worked perfectly. The first one pretty much gave up the ghost after a year–the motor appeared to have rusted out. After some hemming and hawing, the manufacturer sent us a replacement, though, and that one’s been working like a charm for six months or so.
I have learned a few things about optimized composting, though:
The composter is sensitive to humidity. It rains in Vancouver nearly twice as much as it does in Victoria. We keep our composter on our deck, though out of the rain. Still, the additional humidity means the composting material can get too wet. When this happens, we just chuck in a cup or two of sawdust. Top tip: get free sawdust at Home Depot.
Compost can get smelly. This is only a problem when you open the bin to add material, and it doesn’t matter since it’s on the deck. If you’re keeping your composter inside, you can add some baking soda to reduce the odor. Besides, I kind of like this smell. It’s very loamy.
It helps to poke at the dirt every few days with a spade. That way it doesn’t stick the walls of the bin, or gunge up the churning arm.
To my dismay (per Lauren’s comment in this earlier post), the composter won’t break down so-called compostable containers made of corn resin.
In Victoria, we didn’t have a garden, so I would, oddly, illegally dump the compost in a local park or something. In Vancouver, we’re hopefully going to have one of the community garden plots associated with our building. In the meantime, on moonless nights, I’ve been stealthily dumping dirt into a couple of the garden plots.
These are signs from a paint store near our apartment. Maybe I’m just a tree-hugging leftie, but I’m not sure I would have gone with this slogan or image for my signs in eco-friendly Vancouver:
This is the second item in a week on which I’ve been successfully pitched. Either I’m getting busier, or the pitches are getting better. Maybe a bit of both.
Rollip is a very simple website that enables you to apply stylized filters to your photos. You can generate an expired film effect, sepia tones, black and white and so forth. It emulates functionality that you can find in Apple’s iPhoto, and other similar programs.
I don’t need to do this sort of thing very often. When I do, I usually search for a Photoshop tutorial online and follow the steps. This would enable me to have much finer control over the output, obviously. For those without iPhoto or Photoshop, Rollip seems like a viable quick and dirty alternative. Are there other online tools that do this sort of thing?
Rollip offers a freemium model, where you can filter low resolution photos (up to 600 pixels, I think) for free, while you pay for higher res conversions.
One reason Rollip appeals to me is that it’s so obviously a totally boot-strapped, no frills start-up project. The website is aesthetic free–it’s functional only. It’s a bit like Nitobi’s PhoneGap (they’re a client) project, though they’re in the midst of redesigning.
Here are a couple of samples of, uh, Rollip’d images that I generated. That’s the original on top–me emerging from the water after a successful (in that I didn’t get stung by a jellyfish or bitten by an eel) snorkeling session–with two filters applied:
