2HT Weekly Update 6

There was a time I was in one of those complete or have it cut moments before a show. We did our damnest to get all the kinks out but some just kept happening. Not even those little livable ones but sometimes it just wouldn’t work. We were tired, overworked and had tunnel vision. In other words the thing just wasn’t gonna happen. The guy who was in charge of finishing this looks at me and the other fellow with and says, ‘Failure is not an option’ and one of us says, ‘Failure is always an option’. Who said that became a point of contention.

Traffic-ters this week I failed at coming up with a weekly update that is up to the standards of my previous ones. Next week should be better… or I’ll fail then too. After all failure is always an option.

-Sal

Dreams of Midget Town

Most kids that grew up in Long Beach, Lakewood, and other outlaying cities have heard wild tales of a town with houses meant for tiny people. Some even went looking for this place only to come back with wild tales and a night gone. My story isn’t too much different.

It began at Bolsa Chica, like a lot of summer nights, with a bonfire burning and the boredom of a night spent hanging out in a parking lot doing the usual shit that teens get up to on summer nights or perhaps back to someone’s house for a few movies and then home by the time the sun rises. When the beach patrol rolled by saying the beach was closed and to get the hell out we piled into the whale that one guy drove, chucked our cups of coke and whiskey and he started driving. Leaving the beach and turning onto PCH, we end up at a parking lot sitting on car hoods listening to Rodney on the Roq, bumming cigarettes and being bored. We get to telling ghost stories and legends and someone brings up Midget Town and says they know the way. So we follow.

Fueled by youth, excitement and black velvet we head into a wealthier part of Long Beach. With the promise of glory and midget sized town stop at the Ferris Bueller house, ring the bell and run away screaming ‘Save Ferris’. Dashing through the dark streets and back alleys, we follow our guide and his strange directions. Stopping in places to double back and finally coming to a hedge ‘On the other side’s Midget Town’ he swears and we climb the thing. On the other side is the manicured grass of a golf course. He shrugs saying him and his cousins came through and there was Midget Town.

We start to argue.
The sound of a car pulling up stops us and we take off across the grass. All swearing it’s the cops come to get us. Through another set of bushes and doubling back through the streets we pile into the whale and take off.

A bit later at Denny’s we talk about the night. Like adventurers come back from fights with head hunters and pygmies, the weird and exotic inside the boundaries of the south land. Our waitress isn’t impressed with our round of cokes and sampler, our tales of near arrest and saving Ferris. Putting down the bill she tells us in her day Midget Town was up in Hollywood.

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Now playing: Don't Let's Start - They Might Be Giants
via FoxyTunes

2HT Weekly Update 5

This past week saw me contemplating what is really needed as far as modern conveniences. After all a decade ago would someone in my situation feel a near need for internet because the walk to the coffee shop (or library) is too much to send some mail? Or would this even factor as a problem.
I'm not sure if it did for me but breaking down and deciding checking mail without getting dressed is better than being that guy at the library that just rolled out of bed, put on some shoes and walked a few blocks to see if there are any new developments in my virtual life.

This disconnect is somewhat puzzling to me. I can't pinpoint when this need became so pronounced but a recent 'South Park' made me think about it then too. It had a dust bowl like feel but with the internet going down across the country and people going to California because they had a little internet there. Sure life has become overly connected to the point where some people purify themselves by not using the internet or cell phones for days and maybe it's like fasting for them. Transcendence by denial.

Whatever works for those folks, I guess.
-Sal

2HT Weekly Update 4

90s Weekend

Coming of age in the late 90s it use to be 80s flashback weekend on KROQ, after college it seemed that suddenly 90s were on the flashbacks lunch. Also Richard Blade had long since left KROQ to be replaced by Tammy Heidi and later Kat Corbett. But none of that rotating Jockery mattered just that I got to listen to music I had forgotten about. Songs like Tattva and The Way one hit wonder like songs that caught in the old brain cavity and would ring through the week. Or something like Your Woman that happened to get fame near when the Star Wars re-release happened so that riff that sounded a bit like the Imperial March had people humming in all it’s 4 track glory. But those weekends showed all manner of lost gems that couldn’t be crammed into an hour.

This past weekend The End here in Seattle did the same turning over the airwaves to the old time music of its first decade. Back when Alternative wasn’t a generic subgenre of mainstream rock… then again it may never have been a legitimate subgenre of rock. Merely something that wasn’t the 80s pop classics that preceded it. Some of those songs brought back memories that I’d rather forget about. Sitting alone waiting for a show, listening to near static after school or riding long trips on the bus after summer school. But also of dreamier times when my form of difference was a real shock to some kids that I hope are happy with their choices and don’t want for the courage I had to make some seemingly stupid decisions.

There’s a quote that I remember from a documentary on Rock n Roll when it was dealing with the Grunge and Gangsta movements that happened in the 90s it went something like ‘…but they’d have to come up from the underground.’ Seemed to sum up a lot about what was happening. But listening to by gone bands on a long weekend in Seattle just didn’t give any great insights on what the underground was or if it's still there but it was fun anyway.

2HT Weekly Update 3

(Note: I'm part of a theater company and it was decided we should do weekly updates. I haven't been taking it seriously. I'm usually the first one to post.)

Spent a good chunk of my week thinking about Artaud's 'Theatre and its Double'. There's a section where Artaud describes the spreading of the Plague in Europe and uses this as an analogy for the spread of theater. Didn't quite see what he was saying at the time but I often thought about that while doing this show 'One Flea Spare' which I thought was called 'Wonderfully Spare' until 3 weeks into the rehearsal process when I finally realized I wasn't doing a show that was a light heart romp through the Plague years but a serious show about people descending into madness under horrible circumstances.

That show had an illness that spread, like the Plague, through the cast and crew and enhanced the show by giving people this horrible cough. But sucked when you were in the booth trying to stay quiet.

Still waiting on a letter to mail with my envelopes. Other than that nothing to report.

-Sal

2HT Weekly Update 2

(Note: I'm part of a theater company and it was decided we should do weekly updates. I haven't been taking it seriously. I'm usually the first one to post.)

Spent much of the previous week in Issaquah operating a spot light. Gave me perspective on single point perspective. After all in a proscenium house you can create multiple vanishing points but when you get right down to it there is only one that you can exploit to the greatest effect. Beside that I looked over the hardware I had and attempted to sort some of it. Didn't complete this task, perhaps next week.

Other than that I have very little to report beside the fact that working in theater is so much easier when the weather sucks and much harder when it is nice.
Here's to another week,
Sal