The so-so Lebowski

I watched The Big Lebowski last night. I'd seen at least some of it before, but I think I didn't make it through it. I guess I just didn't get it. I didn't find any of the characters likable or interesting. The dialogue seemed as if it was trying to be witty and clever, but I didn't find it so. Well, John Turturro's character was kinda interesting. And he perhaps the only funny line in the movie: "...Nobody fucks with the Jesus." And it's not all that funny. Ostensibly the movie is a comedy.
It was playing somewhere in town "on the big screen". I know a few folks who went, but I didn't. I watched it at home instantly on the netfix. I remember not liking it especially when I watched (part of) it before, so I had no interest in going out and paying money to watch something I don't really care for while surrounded by people who love it, who have this reverence for it, like it's such a great film and somehow deep and meaningful.
I gave it 2 stars, meaning "I didn't like it". I give most things I watch on the netflix 2, 3, or 4 stars. 1 star means it was awful and I couldn't get through it. 5 stars means I loved it and would watch it again several times (not right away; that would be an extremely rare thing). Movies like Glory, The Shawshank Redemption, Driving Miss Daisy...you know, anything with Morgan Freeman...those get 5 stars. Okay, just kidding about Morgan Freeman, although I usually love him. I think I give 5 stars more often than 1, but I'm sure there are lots of 1-star-worthy movies that I'd never even consider watching long enough to give it a star.
Now I'm curios to see exactly what all I've given a 5 star rating. Maybe I'll check it out and make a list. I'm a little crazy like that.
Anyway...
My feeling about The Big Lebowski is not unlike my feeling about Office Space, but I like Office Space a bit more. it might get 3 stars, which for me is not "I liked it" but rather "It's okay". I've heard people speak of Office Space like it could be this life-changing thing. It's not. It's sort of amusing. Of course, I've never worked in an office, so maybe I don't have the necessary background to truly appreciate it.
When I was in high school I worked a couple of summers at the Salvation Army Thrift Store. During college I worked 2 summers as a camp counselor and I worked a couple of semesters part-time sitting at a desk at a student center making sure people signed in and didn't do anything crazy while they were there. Other than that, as an adult, I've never had a "regular" sort of job: never worked in an office or a restaurant or a store; never answered phones or sold Amway products or had a internet business or anything like that; never even temped. Since college, actually it started while I was in college, I've made a living as a musician. I guess that's pretty rare. I have no interest in finding a "regular" job and have no obvious, practical experience if I wanted to apply for one. If I were injured somehow and couldn't play the piano anymore, I'd sort of be fucked. Also, I have no insurance, so I'd really be fucked.


I made a list.

5-star

An Inconvenient Truth

Camp

The Aristocrats

Knocked Up

Borat

Hedwig and the Angry Inch

Shortbus

Big Love: Season 1

This Film is Not Yet Rated

The Five Pennies

Hamlet 2

Rome: Season 2

Star Trek (the newest film)

Perfume: the Story of a Murderer

Spaced: The Complete Series

Blood Moon

10 Items or Less

The Office: Series 2 (BBC)

The Office Special (BBC)

The Office: Season 1 (US)

Dorothy Dandridge: An American Beauty

A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1968, royal Shakespeare Company)

I Love Sarah Jane

What Would Jesus Buy?

Weeds: Season 1

Heroes: Season 3

Earth 2 (TV series)

Coupling: Season 1, 2 & 3

Regarding Henry

Grease 2

Stargate: The Ark of Truth

Auschwitz: Inside the Nazi State (BBC documentary)

The League of Gentlemen: Series 1 (BBC)

The Celluloid Closet

Bill Cosby: Himself

The Education of Shelby Knox

My Favorite Year

Paper Clips (WATCH THIS)

The Comedians of Comedy: The Movie

Holiday Inn

Gentleman’s Agreement

Park

Walk hard: The Dewey Cox Story

Unbreakable

The Dark Crystal

Farscape: Season 1, 2 & 3

The Fifth Element

Eddie Izard: Dressed to Kill

Daniel Tosh: Completely Serious

Good Night, and Good Luck

Casablanca

The Glenn Miller Story

Sliders: Season 1 & 2 (went steadily downhill after that, if there’d been a Season 6: 1-star)

Dr. Strangelove

Godzilla (1998, Matthew Broderick)

Enemy Mine

The Color of Magic

Sex Drive

Chaplin: The Movie

Seven Pounds

Penelope

Arrested Development: Season 1 & 2

Better Off ted: Season 1

The IT Crowd: Series 1 & 2

Kidnapped (series)

A Clockwork Orange

The Adventures of Baron Munchausen

WALL-E

Dune

The Guild: Season 1, 2 & 3

Avatar: The Last Airbender: (the series…really great, and I’m not an anime fan)

Pushing Daisies: Season 1

Skins: Volume 1

Spartacus: Blood and Sand

Sweet Land

I rated these 5-star, but probably shouldn’t have

Little Miss Sunshine

The F-Bomb: A Documentary (I don’t even remember this)

The Producers (that has to be wrong)

100 Girls

1 star

Vegas in Space

Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter

Delta of Venus

The Last Kennedy

Babylon 5: The Lost Tales

Day of Wrath

Specimen

Drew Hastings: Irked and Miffed

Sizzle Beach, USA (early Kevin Costner)

The Breakup Artist

Vampires Anonymous

Sinners

Cyber Wars

Girls will Be Girls

Nature’s grave

The Girlfriend Experience

Warlock

House of Voices

The Beach Party at the Threshold of Hell

Flesh for Frankenstain

Ratko: The Dictator’s Son

Severed: Forest of the Dead

Rampage

The Devil’s Tomb

Life Blood

Thr3e

If I was a sculptor…but then again, no

Often lately when I’m writing it feels like I’m sculpting. I’ve never sculpted. Well, maybe I did in some elementary school art class, but who can remember that? Not me. I don’t know how to sculpt. But this feeling I have lately is what I imagine sculpting to be like. It may happen when I’m working on a big script or, more likely, when I’m composing.

The feeling is that of having a big chunk of material that I’m chipping away at to create something. I don’t mean I’m literally looking at all the possible words or notes that I could use, then I eliminate the ones I won’t use until I have a speech or melody. It’s more that I have a certain amount of material that I have to write, and I chip away at it little by little as I write more and more.

With a script, it’s a result of the “pre-writing” I do. My first major step with a new piece is to write a lot about the idea, the characters, the story, etc. So by the time I start writing the first real draft, I already know the story, the scenes are, what happens in each; if it’s a musical I know where the songs happen, what they’re about, who sings them, and what basic type each song is: ballad; up-tempo; charm song; something dancy. I may not know exactly how long the piece will end up being, but I know I have certain things I’ll have to write before I have a complete draft of the script. That doesn’t mean I don’t find new ideas or surprises as I write. I do, and I embrace them, and they sometimes lead to great things.

I’ve tried writing the other way: starting with a blank page and some germ of an idea; supposedly discovering what it’s all about as I write it. But it seems to produce a confused jumble of a piece that I have a hard time making sense of. It’s not a very satisfying process for me. I think I have a strong left- and right-brain: I’m organized and creative. In those quizzes you can take that show a result of a brain with a spot somewhere representing where you fall on the left-brain/right-brain thing, my result is almost right in the center, on more than one test. So I think my pre-writing method satisfies both hemispheres, both tendencies.

I don’t really pre-write music in that same way. However, since all I really write anymore is songs and other material for musicals, I always have the framework of lyrics and character and dramatic situation. Often as I write music, the lyrics will change, sometimes a little and sometimes a lot, but the basics—subject matter, character, situation— generally stay.

 The sculpting feeling is even stronger with the music. Although I often have (sometimes very clear) ideas of what the music will sound like as I’m writing lyrics, I generally don’t really work on the music until I have a good draft of the script done. So just like with the pre-writing and the script, I know when I start on the music that I have a certain amount of things I have to write before I have a complete draft of the score. So in the larger sense, I’m chipping away at the score, song by song, and with each song I’m chipping away at it, section by section, phrases by phrase, occasionally even note by note.

So, today I will return to sculpting. I’ve been working for a while this summer on a new show. I’ve written a lot this summer: a 10-minute play; a 10-minute musical; another play and a musical each about 15 minutes or so; a one-act play which I think is done, for now anyway; a one-act musical for a young audience (first draft of script done, needs a lot of work, more story development—guess I didn’t do enough pre-writing—no music yet); and this musical I’m focusing on now—a long one-act, an hour, maybe 70 minutes or so. If I really work at it the rest of this week and next, I could have a mostly complete draft of the score soon.

Mmmuffins

I've always loved blueberries. I know it started in childhood with Boo Berry® cereal. It was my favorite. Last fall there was a store where I lived near Mobile that carried it. Of course I bought some, and it's still good.
http://www.bofads.com/pictures/boo.jpg

I'm not as big a fan as other berries. I think it's that they seem more tart than sweet, where blueberries are a little more even in the tart/sweet balance.
I saw my friend Mara's post about blueberries and jamming this morning. It reminded me that I'd bought blueberries last time I was at the grocery store, and they were sitting in my frig waiting, as patiently as possible, to be used. Blueberries goal in life, their raison d'être, is not, as you might have read in some book on biology or genetics or such like (I've certainly read such like), but rather to find a medium through which to enter my belly. The medium may be a cobbler, or a store brand equivalent to the Cheerios®, or, occasionally, my hand popping a few berries right into my mouth.
Well, today the medium is muffins. I've often made muffins from a box, typically Betty Crocker® Wild Blueberry. If you can find the ones with 2 cans of blueberries, that's the best. I haven't seen them for a few years now.
But today, it was blueberry muffins "from scratch". (That phrase originally meant to start from the beginning with no advantage, from the starting line scratched into the ground. It was a sports term.) I tried once before and ended up with what can only be described as mini-cobblers. they tasted fine, but were pretty messy. What they needed was to have been made in their own little bowls, or other containers. Like single serve pies (Yes, I was watching Pushing Daisies Season 2recently.) Today's turned out wonderfully. In both cases I used recipes I found online, but last time I forgot to add baking powder until the wet and dry ingredients were already blended. I figure that had something to do with the result.
I used a different recipe today, and altered it a little. The biggest difference is that I added cinnamon. Here's my altered recipe:

Basic Blueberry Muffins “from scratch”

(based on a recipe I found online: http://allrecipes.com/Recipe/Blueberry-Muffins-I/Detail.aspx)

Ingredients:

2 cups flour

1/2 cup sugar

2 teaspoons baking powder

a few dashes of ground cinnamon

1 cup milk

1/3 cup vegetable oil

1 egg

3/4 cup fresh blueberries

Directions:

Preheat oven to 400 degrees F (205 degrees C). Line a 12-cup muffin tin with paper liners or grease muffin pan.

Rinse blueberries. Mix dry ingredients together. Mix wet ingredients together. Mix wet and dry together. If it seems too dry, add a little more milk. Add blueberries. Spoon into muffin pan.

Bake for 20 minutes, or longer if needed. 

And here's the result:

They're very tasty. And I have plenty left.
Two years ago, when I was doing Into the Woods at Mill Mountain Theatre in Roanoke, Virginia and was totally in love with April, who played the witch, I made a lot of muffins and shared them with her in what I later called our "blueberry muffin mornings" (it's a lyric in a song I wrote).
Sadly, I have no one, friend or otherwise, with whom I can share a blueberry muffin morning or, at this point, afternoon. So, if anyone's hungry, let me know. I'll be eating these for the next couple of days.

for Mara

My friend Mara, who is going to be the Next Food Network Star, has a blog (“Sing For Your Supper” –she’s also a singer) where she posts videos of her cooking. So I thought in her honor, I’d just post this picture of what I made tonight.

Stir-fry beef & vegetables with rice. It’s Variation # whatever of Chris’s basic recipe.

Blood and Sand

So, once again, I find myself awake at 4am. Why do I do this? Sometimes I get distracted by work. If I’m writing or orchestrating or whatever, I’ll sometimes notice that it’s midnight and decide to work just a little longer before I go to bed. Then suddenly it’s 2am…then 3…then 4. And at 4am I just have this sense that there’s not much point in going to bed. I’ll either not sleep much at all, or sleep until noon (or later). Basically, by that point my sleep schedule is already fucked up. I know if I sleep ‘til noon that I’ll have a hard time getting to sleep by any sort of decent hour that night. So it makes as much sense, or more, to just not really try to get a night’s sleep. That way, maybe I’ll be tired the next night and be able to sleep.

But there’s a problem with that too. It seems that once I stay up all night, I’m more likely to do it again a few nights later. And that’s what’s happening now. I stayed up all night a couple of nights ago when I was working on an older show of mine. It’s something I orchestrated on a program I don’t really use any more.

I recently bought a new computer and was transferring files from the old computer. I didn’t see much point in transferring those files for a program I no longer have, but I didn’t want to lose the work I’d done. So I downloaded a trial version of the program so I could open those files. I’d intended to just print them out and later input all the info into the program I do use: Finale. But the trial version of the other program wouldn’t let me print. It did let me save the files as MIDI versions. So I did that and opened the MIDI files in Finale, then copy and paste them into a new Finale file. It took a lot of tweaking and detail work, but I wanted to get it all done before the trial version expired (in 15 days or so).

Anyway…I stayed up all night, slept maybe half an hour that morning, then went to bed by midnight or so. But I didn’t feel fully rested. It takes a few days to catch up. Unfortunately I took a nap for a few hours tonight around 7 or 8pm.

Tonight I’ve been staying up watching Spartacus: Blood and Sand. It’s an original series on Starz. I watched it this spring instantly on the netflix, and loved it. I kept it in my instant queue, thinking I might watch it again, and I just saw that it will only be available for several more days. So I decided to watch it again.

Often if I start watching something late at night, I’ll fall asleep with it on. But this series is actually very good. I especially liked certain plot twists that happened about half-way throughout the season. I suppose this time I’m watching in anticipation of those moments, which keeps me watching and waiting for the next and next and next episode. Also it’s nice to see the various details which I’d forgotten.

If you've not seen it, and like gritty historical drama, I recommend it. It's a lot like the Rome series on HBO a few years back: violent and sexual and graphic, and well-written.

what's that smell?

I’m pretty sure I’m gonna have to move. I just moved into this apartment a couple of months ago, and I like it here, except for one thing.

These apartments each share a kitchen with a neighbor. That’s no big deal. My kitchen-mate never cooks, and I only rarely see her in there. It also shares the AC and heat, and we split the electric bill. That’s also fine. The neighbor likes it cooler than I do, but that’s okay.

The problem is that we’re breathing the same air…and she smokes. I am allergic to cigarette smoke. When I was a teen, I was sick a lot. I went to several doctors, and finally to a neurologist who diagnosed me with migraines. I had a lot of headaches and then would get sick. I missed a lot of school. So the neurologist gave me 2 medicines which really kinda made things worse. Maybe that’s another blog.

Anyway…it turns out I wasn’t really having migraines. I was just allergic to everything: dust, grass, pets, several common foods—seriously…beef, eggs, lettuce, corn—and cigarettes. I wasn’t extremely allergic to any one thing, just a little allergic to lots of things. But cigarette smoke was the thing I was most allergic to. I took shots for a while—5 a week to start. Eventually I stopped them. The food allergies aren’t that bad, and I just avoid the other stuff as much as possible.

But I can’t avoid it my neighbor smoking inside her apartment when we share the ventilation. I’ve talked to her twice about it, most recently a couple of days ago. After the first time we talked it got better for a few weeks, but then got really bad again. And after the other day’s brief talk, I smelled smoke that evening and yesterday afternoon and night and right now at 5am. A couple of times a friend, Julia, came over and mentioned the smell right away.So it's not just me being sensitive.

I told the neighbor that if she keeps smoking inside I’d have to move. I don’t want to move. I like the apartment; it’s a good location; the rent is cheap; and my stuff is already here. Finding an apartment is a pain. I should know: I’ve done it every year or 2 lately. But I just can’t live here like this. I can confront people when it’s needed, but I don’t want to be the annoying neighbor who keeps banging on the wall to get you to stop doing that annoying thing you do.

She’s been living here for 11 years, and she’s not the brightest person around. Despite her reassurance that she’s been doing and will do better, it’s not happening.

I mentioned it to the landlord about a month ago, so he’s aware that there’s an issue. Later today (after I’ve slept some) I’m going to have to call the landlord and see what he has to say. Hopefully, I can get out the lease without paying extra. . The lease does not prohibit smoking inside the apartment. There is a clause about not doing anything to “disturb, endanger, or interfere with other tenants” so maybe he’ll be cool about it.

Now’s the time to do it. It’s early-to-mid August, and there may still be some apartments available in walking distance from the university where I’m expecting to pick up a lot of accompanying work, maybe even something closer. And not too much more expensive. It’ll be a pain to move all my stuff, and I’ll have to find a bed. I’m sleeping on one the landlord bought. And frankly, I’d rather feel absolutely free to walk into my kitchen without putting any clothes on without worrying that my “neighbor” won’t see me and freak out. 

New Blog

So, I decided to start a blog. What will this blog be about, people have asked.
Well, I am a musician. I work in theatre. I write plays and musicals. I'm sure I'll blog about that stuff, but that is not the topic of this blog.
I am very liberal...politically and socially. I sometimes rant about things I see or read that just seem ridiculously wrong. I'm sure I'll blog about that stuff, but that is not the topic of this blog.
I am single, in my late 30's, and while I'm not actively looking to date right now, I am open to it. I'm sure I'll blog about that stuff, but that is not the topic of this blog.
I read books and watch movies and go to plays and musicals. I'm sure I'll blog about that stuff, but that is not the topic of this blog.
So...what will this blog be about, you may ask. Go ahead, ask. I'll wait.

 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 

 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 

Hey, thanks for asking. This blog will be about anything and everything I think to write about. Hence the title. I thought about going with "Mister Christer's Multifarious Thoughts". Multifarious means "about everything", but it's not a commonly used word. Even a really intelligent friend of mine thought I meant nefarious ("evil"). I'm not above evil thoughts, but I figured I'd just avoid any confusion if I happen post good thoughts.

Hopefully there will be things worth writing, good and evil. But to start things off, I'm going to post some old blogs, edited and abridged. Mostly these are from MySpace. (Who's even on MySpace anymore?)

Here is the first blog I ever posted:

April 06, 2006 (MySpace) "To blog or not to blog..."

To blog, or not to blog, that is the question:
whether it's nobler on the webpage to suffer
the ignominy of appearing to have nothing to say
or to take pen (keyboard) against this single trouble
and by writing mindlessly end it.

In other words, is it better to blog about nothing or to never have blogged at all?