Klara by Dale Innis & Karima Hoisan

Well, this is just too much fun. :) Very good Second Life friend and collaborator liked the little Klara piece so much that she voiced it and set it to the perfect music and made it into a rather wonderful YouTube! Definitely more accessible :) and more of an experience this way than the 327MB pdf file. Wooot!

Digital Rabbit Hole

Very excited to share with you all, this off-beat, pretty long (almost 10 minutes) surreal video collaboration with Dale Innis
Those of you who read me regularly, know that Dale Innis is a scripter friend who has collaborated with me and also with Natascha & I for the last 10 years and lately has been dabbling in all sorts of AI Art, especially MidJourney, which is a veritable game-changer in this blossoming field.
He showed me a pdf file of slides and a story-line, that he had made and I fell in love…fell obsessed, is a better word, to try to bring this to a way more people could see it.
This is how the project was born. I found, what we both agree, is the perfect music   Meditative Music and I made a voice-over and edited the slides into what you’ll see below.
This is a very slow-…

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Much Ado About Whedon

Yeah, obvious title. :)

So I went out for/on Father’s Day here and saw Joss Whedon’s Much Ado About Nothing at the Burns.

It was good. A pretty straight-up modern-dress treatment, using the Bard’s original words; the funny parts were funny (it’s a comedy after all), the suspenseful parts were suspenseful, and the lovey-dovey parts were lovey-dovey.

Spoilers in the below, skip to the last couple paragraphs, for anyone who hasn’t seen it and might!

The main twists I noticed were making Conrade female (and the beginning of Act 1 Scene 3 an almost-sex scene), and the cute touch of having a black woman wedding guest at backstage center when Claudio says that he will marry a particular woman even “were she an Ethiope”. There’s no reaction or anything, just a quick cut away, but it was definitely a wink at the audience.

Significant Whedon fanservice. The Beatrice-Benedick romance is (going by the actors) Fred and Wesley from Angel (at which there is much rejoicing in certain circles). That’s Captain Mal from Firefly as the funny bumbling Constable Dogberry (the Watch locking themselves out of their car is another cute, what, synachronism, as is the production of an iPod when Don Pedro says “Come, shall we hear this music?”). And that’s the good-guy doctor Tam, also from Firefly, as the evil Don John.

(And another synachronism is the live smartphone video accompanying “My lord, your brother John is ta’en in flight, And brought with armed men back to Messina”, wahaha.)

Amy Acker is a great Beatrice. I could not for the life of me remember where I’d seen her before for the first part of the film, because she (unlike Fred) is confident and even haughty; only at some point in there where she softens did I think “Oh, it’s Fred!”.

Jillian Morgese is a pretty and convincing Hero, the wronged ingenue. From the website, she was being an extra in ummmm The Avengers when Whedon himself suggested she try out for Hero, which is extremely cool and fairy-tale-like.

(And what the heck is a female character doing being named “Hero”? Shakespeare’s fault, and extremely confusing. Someone must explain this to me!)

So in general, it was fun. The Burns is a comfy intimate theater (three screens, of which I think they were using only two today, seating about the size of the front third of your typical cineplex theater). And there’s a locally-owned candy and chocolate store right nearby! Hee hee.

So far the fact that Whedon is a flippin’ genius (for which I offer as evidence Once more, with feeling in particular, of which I now have the Original Cast Album, among other notable notables) has not reached out and struck me from this film; maybe I will gradually realize amazing things about it, but also maybe not. In any case, it was well crafted, and a Good Time, and I am glad I went.

Briefly noted

One of the designers on Project Runway is named Gunnar Deathrage (more or less). World of Warcraft character, or Nordic heavy metal band vocalist?

Everyone must watch La ragazza con la pistola at once! (It’s on Netflix streaming video, if that helps.) A wild innocent 60’s comedy, with a side of strange surreal Sicily. I don’t know if it was run of the mill bad pop film in its time and is weird and strange only because I don’t know the genre, or if it’s deeply offensive or misogynistic in ways I’m too dense to see, but I loved it.

(Netflix showed it to me for some reason when I searched on “lara” to see if they had any of them Tomb Raider movies. Serendipity! Oh, and they call it “The woman with the pistol” or something I think…)

It’s disheartening to listen to NPR talking to Undecided Voters about the Presidential Election. I mean, these are presumably NPR listeners and all, but still they’re idiots. “I voted for Obama four years ago, and I think he’s tried to do the right thing, but he hasn’t been very effective, and maybe it’s time for a change of leadership.”

Come on, people. Use just one more brain cell, and finish the thought. “So I’m thinking of voting for people who will go back to the policies that destroyed the economy last time”. Great idea?

There’s an obvious political cartoon that I would draw if I had any drawing skills. I don’t know why the Democrats don’t have a whole raft of these. (Maybe they do.)

Panel one: burning building (a factory, say, no resemblance to the World Trade Center), two cartoony people upset in the foreground, vaguely red-colored (not Native American red, cartoony devil red) figure with a flamethrower capering off rightward.

“Oh no, someone with a flamethrower has set fire to the building!”

Panel two: half-extinguished building, blue-tinted firefighter vaguely resembling Obama spraying with hose, same people in foreground.

“The firefighters are taking too long to put the fire out. Maybe we should get the guy with the flamethrower back.”

Panel three: second person looks incredulously at speaker from previous panel.

“…”

Panel four: maybe the red guy stomping on the firehouse while the firefighter struggles gamely on.

“Or not.”

Cut to word panels: “Romney/Ryan: those policies caused the recession. Does anyone think they’ll fix it now?”

This screenplay generously donated to the public domain… :)