January 2016
Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat Sun
« Dec   Jun »
 123
45678910
11121314151617
18192021222324
25262728293031

Year 2016

Entries 5 Total

American Wizard Schools

Jul 7, ’16 10:23 AM

This morning I’m reading a new short story by JK Rowling about the American wizarding school: Ilvermorny! It’s pretty fun as far as it goes. Did you know the American school was founded by the Irish? But there are some problems.

wizard

Native American wizards didn’t have wands before the school started?

Two more magical boys from the Wampanoag tribe had been joined by a mother and two daughters from the Narragansett, all interested in learning the techniques of wandwork in exchange for sharing their own magical learning.

Phooey.

Also the school is in Massachusetts which I suppose is OK, but come on, a wild west wizard school would be better.

Think about it:

  • Santa Fe
  • Pueblo wizards build a school into a cliff face
  • Wands are bird wings, turtle rattles
  • Spanish wizards are beautiful but gold hungry
  • Cowboy wizards want to leave it all behind, sing beautiful songs and move cows
  • Rattlesnake Parseltongue
  • Ghost Riders in the Sky

Maybe I should get into writing fan fiction. I think I’m on to something here.

 

Comments (2)

The Lost Wheels of Time

Jul 3, ’16 1:06 PM

Funny isn’t it how things work out?

Just a few days ago I was in a kind of panic that strikes the artistically self-employed. Nothing is coming, I’m broke, there’s no way forward. But within hours of voicing these sensible thoughts I got a call.

The background

My friend Justin was filling in for a street show in the Ljubljana street theater festival. They had lost an actor and were panicked looking for an emergency replacement for five shows. They got his number through the grapevine, he rehearsed for a few days, and boom! he was in the show. Unfortunately during the first performance he cracked his toe mighty hard on a set piece and after he got home he noticed it was swollen and purple.

27411643044_cf1894c395_o

I took him to the hospital. (That’s where I found out about the animation Pat & Mat.) And we waited for hours for him to be seen, x-rayed and reported back to. It wasn’t broken, that was the good news. But the nurse told him to stay off it. The show he was hired for is violently active so he was faced with a problem, limp through and risk worse injury or take a pass on the rest of the performances.

The next morning I got a phone call from the street show saying they were an actor down and would I possibly have the time to learn the show and perform. Justin was out and he gave them my number.

I showed up Thursday at noon and paced through the show as best I could. Piece by piece under the summer sun it started to come together. By 9:30 there were about 200 people waiting, the music came on and I jumped out on stage.

So, how was it?

You know in some movies how people are in a boxcar racing down the tracks, they throw their bag and then leap from the moving car, pumping their legs as fast as possible in the air then they hit the ground and try to keep enough speed to avoid falling flat on their face? It went a little like that.

During the show I had a few moments of fear that I was about to fall headlong into a clock, and I did kick over the wind machine. But I survived, and I tell ya, my weekend is a lot more exciting than I had planned for.

Rabit_Bojan Okorn

We’ll play it once more, today at 7.30 in Nova Gorica, Slovenia. Then Adam and Spiros will pack their van and travel to Poland where I suppose they will be on the look-out for another rabbit. Another energetic and game actor to don the latex rabbit mask and leap from the train.

These photos were taken by Bojan Okorn and were published on the Ana Desetnica Flickr account.

Comments (1)

Is this it?

Jul 2, ’16 12:42 PM

This is a wonderful stop motion cartoon series that I just found out about a few days ago. But they were hugely popular in the 80s and 90s all over the world.

Thanks to its distinct lack of spoken dialogue, the show became popular throughout the world, being aired in nations that include Czechoslovakia (now Czech Republic and Slovakia), Sweden, Syria, Iraq, Poland, former Yugoslavia, Iceland, Denmark, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Brazil, Finland, Japan, Norway, Spain, Iran, Hungary, Jordan, South Africa, and South Korea. -Wikipedia

Ladies and Gentlemen, Pat and Mat

In this episode they are trying to make time for doing laundry but keep getting distracted by their crossword puzzles. It’s wonderful writing, really clear and clownish. And the detail of their world is really beautiful.

Comments Off on Is this it?

Bureautory

Jun 28, ’16 1:17 PM

Now I live in Ljubljana, a city I’ve been a visitor to for a few years going. As a visitor I visit friends, drink some coffees, teach workshop on masks, talk about the workshop on masks, walk through night time streets guided by intuition alone. But now that I live here, I’m a lot less active.

Dore_02

What happened?

When I moved here in April I was ready to work. I had three months worth of visa waiver to rest on until I got a long term visa and could start working. Three months felt like more than enough time to get my long-term, it felt like an eternity. Unfortunately it was the purgatory kind of eternity.

You see, my application for a visa has been held up for two and a half months in the some ministry office waiting for who knows what kind of approval before they can pass it on to me and I’ll get to pass on to the next echelon of the process. It’s given me a lot of time to freak out about plan B, plan B. Because when you’re in visa approval purgatory there’s no chance of working. Not legally or even illegally. Who is going to take some one on who ends their pseudo-interview chat with, “it’s funny you should ask but no, my visa application is still in process.”

styx

So what are you going to do?

I’m not making any money yet, but I’ve got a few projects to keep me busy. Casey and Barbara, two good friends from Helikos will be here in a few weeks and we’ll get working on a show they want to make. It will have something to do with birds.

As I was setting this site back up I looked back through the archives a bit to check that all the photos are showing up OK. I came across two posts that caught my eye as references in one way or another to this nebulous idea kicking around in my head about a bird show.

The first one is this cool dude. I was in Chicago when I posted this but I don’t know how I found it.

The second I found when I was at Helikos and thinking more specifically about masks. That’s these animal illustrations on human faces by Charlotte Caron. Seeing them again I think they’re an excellent scale for the human face.

Comments Off on Bureautory

The Sleeping Giant

Jun 27, ’16 7:01 PM

The following is a transcript of a story I told for some 5-8 year olds in East Helena at the very end of 2015.

I’m going to tell you a story about right here. It’s a story from a long time ago, before we had houses around here, before we had roads around here. But there were still a lot of people who lived here. And one day they heard a sound.

Boom boom boom! BOOM!

Sleeping-GiantIt was so loud, everybody was so scared. There was an old man who said, “I know what that sound is, that’s the sound of the snow falling off the trees.” Everybody looked at him and said, the snow falling off the trees? It’s spring all the snow is melted, there’s no snow to..”

Boom Boom Boom!

A little old lady said “I know what that is, that’s the sound of buffalo running through the valley, it’s so loud it sounds like thunder.” Everybody looked at her. “The buffalo don’t come in the springtime, everybody knows they run in the fall…”

Boom Boom Boom!

All along standing in the back there was a little girl and she was looking to the east, beyond the mountains to the horizon.

Continue Reading… Comments Off on The Sleeping Giant