Author: Dale

The Cold Labyrinth

Posted on by Dale

You may recall that at the westpoint of the labyrinth I have a bowl to contain water, the classical element of the West.  You may also recall that the glass bowl I had there for a while succumbed to the cold last January when I left it uncovered and the Great Storm split it in twain:

broken labyrinth bowl

So when I bought Brooks Barrow‘s limestone bowl last March at the American Crafts Council show, the first thing I asked him was how it would withstand the occasional ice storm.  He assured me that Wisconsin limestone is the hardest there is and it should be fine.

And so it has proven:

frozen limestone bowl

Normally I keep the bowl covered so that water doesn’t collect in it.  During the summer, of course, it would be a breeding ground for mosquitoes, but also the decaying plant matter that inevitably collects in bowls/birdbaths/fountains will leave stains.

Here’s a closer look:

frozen limestone bowl

It’s hard to see, but the center white ice is actually bulged up.  The water froze from the cold, cold limestone inward, pushing the last of the water up and stressing it white.

The poor little beetle in the lower right is dead, not resting.  Circle of life, etc.

The only other element in the labyrinth that was affected by this week’s freezing temperatures is this one:

frozen limestone bowl

This is a bottle of Crystal Head vodka, or at least it used to be. Crystal Head is Dan Aykroyd’s product, and the packaging/marketing is a hoot.  Beside the skull-shaped bottle, the box it comes in proudly proclaims that it is filtered through “crystals” on his upstate farm/distillery/whatever.

Despite all this, it’s actually a really good vodka, and it amused me to have a skull sitting out in the labyrinth, especially one that you could stop and take a swig from as you passed by.  (It’s at the northwest corner, on the bank overlooking the Dancing Faun.) I’ve also used it for pouring libations to the Universe over at the fire pit, and the Lichtenbergians passed it around during a memorial ritual for a member.

I used to store it and then put it back out for each session, but then I got lazy.  It’s not as if it were going to freeze, after all.  Then one day the large square top to the cork came off, as I supposed all glued-on items will eventually do if exposed to the elements long enough, and all was well till one night I was walking the labyrinth and decided to take a swig and OH MY GOD IT WAS MOSTLY RAINWATER INSTEAD OF VODKA.

All I could think was amoebic dysentery and immediately rinsed my mouth out with gin, as one does.  Blergh!

I left it out there as a purely decorative object, and now the water has frozen.  I like the frost on the interior of the top.

Someday soon I will need to buy another bottle so that we can continue to consume booze ritualize to our hearts’ content.

An interesting development

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Here’s an interesting twist to the story of my life: after years of not doing theatre—Spamalot notwithstanding—it seems I’m turning into an actor.

I’ve been cast as the Narrator/Mysterious Man and the Wolf in Newnan Theatre Company’s production of Into the Woods, which should be very interesting indeed.

The Wolf is usually played by the same actor as Cinderella’s Prince.  Indeed, the two share the same set of rhymes in “Hello, Little Girl” and “Any Moment,” i.e., exploring/boring/ignoring (at least in the original cast album; the printed score omits those lines from the Prince’s song in Act II).  The concept for this production, as far as I understand it, is that the Wolf will be a puppet manipulated by me.

I like that, actually, puppets being a longtime interest of mine.  I’m curious to see the design—I do hope it’s a full-size bunraku-style puppet.  I’m also curious whether I’ll be singing the role as the Narrator, or somehow as a different persona.  I’ll find out soon enough: first readthrough is Monday night.

I directed Into the Woods and played the Baker more than 20 years ago, in 1992, and it was a great show to work on.  We had a talented cast, and audiences enjoyed it even if they were taken aback by Act II.

Random memories from that show:

  • After auditions for that production, I was sitting in the breakfast nook trying to nail down the cast.  I seemed to be missing key pieces to the casting puzzle, and The Child, who would have been four years old at the time, asked what I was doing.  I told him, and he replied, “You should play the Baker.”  Click.  It still weirds me out that my four-year-old even understood what “casting” meant.
  • Losing my Jack to health issues and going to school in a quandary—young Ryan Vila was a member of the magazine staff there in the media center, and I asked him if he could sing.  Don’t know, he said, so I took him into the server room where I had a keyboard set up and tested him—he was a natural tenor!  Unfortunately, he had no sense of rhythm, so “Giants in the Sky” was always a bit of a muddle.  I would have conducted him, but I was asleep on the stage in front of him during that number alas.
  • One night, we had a celebrity in the audience (whose name escapes me—Braves player, etc., somebody help me out here…) and that was the night that during the final number, during all those infinitives—“To mind, To heed, To find, To think, To teach, To join”—every single cast member forgot the words.  All of us.  “To… buh buh buh buh… Into the woods!  Into the woods!”
  • Sitting atop a rolling tower, inches from the Fresnel lighting instrument (our ceiling was only 12 feet tall), singing “You Are Not Alone” with Ryan.
  • Cradling the Baker’s infant wrapped in The Child’s security blanket.  It smelled like him, and my tears were real.

Our Milky White was a cardboard cutout, but I don’t think it was as bad as any of these.  Warning: clicking on that link will confirm your status as an awful, awful person.

Into the Woods is a brilliant show, like almost everything Sondheim has ever done, but the thing I like most about it is the multiple layers of mythos: the Hero’s Journey (into the woods, and home before dark!); Bruno Bettleheim’s The Uses of Enchantment and its analysis of fairy tales as deep structures for empowering children; the reverse of that idea, that “happy ever after” is 1) contingent upon how you got there; and 2) not going to happen anyway; and the interconnectedness of all things.  Truly a beautiful show!

I’ll keep you posted.

dingbat

But wait—there’s more!

Into the Woods closes on March 29, just in time for spring break, during which we hope to travel maybe, and then, on April 14, I will decamp to Columbus where I will play the lawyer Ed Devery in the Springer Opera House production of Born Yesterday from April 30-May 16.

That’s right: at the age of 60 I am becoming a semi-professional actor.  When the opportunity was offered—you’ll forgive me if I spare you the details—I thought, “Well, this is interesting.  Sure, why not?”

It’s not really a paying gig—a room and a per diem, basically—but how exciting to be asked to join the State Theatre of Georgia!  Again, I have tons of questions about how this all works, but there’s time enough to ask, right?  At the moment, I’m just waiting for the contract/employment paperwork to arrive.

So that takes care of the first six months of 2015…

Technology: Bah.

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So one of my major projects for this week is to dig into InDesign CS 5.5 and relearn it from the ground up so that I can design/layout Marc Honea’s omnibus opus Another Farewell to the Theatre.  It’s a massive collection of essays, fictive works, aphorisms, and haiku, and I want it to look spiffy.  (That is a technical term.)

It must be understood that although I have used InDesign in the past with some success, my glory days with the program are all back when it was still PageMaker.  In fact, I have used PageMaker since version 1 and it was made by Aldus Corp and you had to switch out the disks on the Macintosh Classic to load the program into memory.

Mac classic
Yes, that’s how old I am.

 

As the years went by and I had less and less call to lay out multi-page documents—and those that I did have to do were easily handled by the page layout capabilities of Pages—I lost my grip on InDesign.  I kept it updated because that’s what I do, but all the changes in interface and attitude slipped right under my radar.

Therefore, when Pages proved unequal to the task of making AFT3 look spiffy, I decided to retrain myself in InDesign so that I would not pull out my hair before I got past the Introduction. I started yesterday, and all seemed to be going well.  I retrained my brain to understand the “frames” concept instead of the old flow technique, and I thought I was getting somewhere fast.

But then things started going widdershins.

(Argle bargle alert: skip this next paragraph)

At first I thought it was just my not having read every single word of Adobe InDesign CS5 Bible, because I’m a skimmer at heart, but the more I worked with the file this morning, the worse it got.  The text frame on the master page wouldn’t accept text on the layout itself, and then it started telling me it couldn’t communicate with some “Rule Book” and therefore was not going to apply whatever I had told it to do—only it did.  And then I clicked to flow the text of the Introduction and it automatically started adding pages to the individual spread rather than going to the next page, maxing out at ten pages after which it stopped and complained—and it didn’t actually flow the text into those new pages.

(/argle bargle)

So something is corrupt somewhere.  I’m running tests on the computer itself, and when those are done I’m deleting InDesign and reinstalling it.

Argh.  And also Bah.

A reflection

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During the month of November, I was doing mostly nothing for one reason or the other [spoiler alert: it was the elections], but one thing I did do was go back and re-read this blog from the very beginning.

You know what, guys?  I’m a good writer, and entertaining, and often very funny.  So I’ve decided that I will be pulling nuggets of pure gold from my posts in the coming year and redisplaying them.  Not often, but enough to make you appreciate my wit.

For example:

Snark: in which I look askance at a public official who is caught doing the ridiculous and invents an excuse that is entertaining if not plausible in the least.

What, you were expecting some year-end meditation?  Pfft.  And also tut tut.

Cocktails: the next level

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With the gift of an Amazon gift card, I was able to purchase two books I had on my wish list:

New cocktail books

Both are studies in cocktail construction/deconstruction, and just with a cursory glance I can see how I am going to have to convert most of the rest of the house into a cocktail research palace.

After all, I don’t really have a place to store my liquid nitrogen now, do I?  Or vats for macerating liqueurs, or fermenting bitters, or any of the other cool stuff promised by these books.

I may have to start slow, like using boiling water to make crystal clear ice cubes.  More work is required.

Lichtenbergian goals, 2015

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Seven Dreams

Definitely tops on the list: The challenge of writing an opera has been both invigorating and frustrating, but I think the results so far are worth continuing.  It would be nice to think that I will have this finished by the end of the year.  Nice, but not probable.

3 Old Men

Another success from this year that I want to continue to work on.  My experience at Alchemy with the 3 Old Men gang was profound, and I want to find ways to enhance/expand our theme camp.  [Hint: it involves a deer stand and a megaphone.]

Five Easier Pieces

Maybe.

Christmas Carol

I spent the first half of this year rebuilding the original piano score for A Christmas Carol so that it could be played by a small, live ensemble.  That proved to be an un-possible task for Newnan Theatre Company, and the results were not pretty.

So I will spend this year a) finding an affordable software music sequencer that works like the old EZ•Vision sequencer did; b) learning to use it; and c) completely rescoring Christmas Carol again with a full orchestral accompaniment.  And d) directing the show next year.

SUN TRUE FIRE

Definitely a back burner project, since I have rather enough to be going on with.  But I’m determined to develop better work habits, so that if I don’t have anything else on my plate on any given day, I can just pull this project out and spend an hour or two on it.  (vid. sub.)

design & construction of labyrinths

I began a notebook earlier this fall wherein I began a serious study of the topology/design of labyrinths.  It is oddly harder than it looks, but I’m beginning to crack the code.  I want to keep digging into the process so that I can easily respond to any landscape or user need with a design that fits the bill.

general work habits

My usual process is to focus very hard on a single project, with just enough Lichtenbergian distractions to avoid being placed on the far end of the autism scale.  I’d like to change that.  I’d like to be able to turn my attentions to several projects in rotation, or even at random, without grinding my mental gears.  I’d also like to be able to say that I have kept working instead of sitting around twiddling my thumbs when one project is at a standstill.

In other words, when Seven Dreams bogged down, why didn’t I simply write an Easier Piece?

Astute readers will have noticed that I did not include the symphony on my goals.  Maybe I forgot about it, maybe I didn’t.

Lichtenbergian goals, 2014

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Each year the members of the Lichtenbergian Society have their Annual Meeting around the fire in the Labyrinth, and part of our ritual—which involves much toasting to all the things—is setting our creative goals for the coming year and evaluating the goals we set for this past year.

All in all, I didn’t do too badly with 2014’s goals.  Of course, with my permanent retirement, there’s no reason I shouldn’t have done more, but hey, it’s Lichtenbergianism.

Five Easier Pieces

Didn’t get to them.  I don’t think I even took a stab at them.  I certainly don’t have them.

song for John Tibbetts

This one I did.  It’s entitled “Your Beauty,” and can be found here.  I don’t know whether it actually works; the key to its effectiveness (if any) is in the live interpretation, and the computer doesn’t come close to being able to do that.   But I think it’s solid enough.

SUN TRUE FIRE

See, here’s the thing with SUN TRUE FIRE.  I was going to spend all of 2014 noodling with the text and experimenting with snippets by taking bits of other people’s music and seeing if I could replicate the effects that I admired: orchestration or harmony or counterpoint, etc.  I kind of started, but then Seven Dreams of Falling came my way.  As a Lichtenbergian, I was honor bound to postpone one work by creating another.  SUN TRUE FIRE isn’t dead; it is sleeping.

Waste books

Another success story.  I have used the Field Notes notebooks for every project, including morning pages (at which I have not been assiduous) and actual waste books (at which I have been slightly better).  Some, like the notebooks on Christmas Carol or “Your Beauty,” have only a few pages in them.  But I filled three notebooks with thoughts and designs and instructions and references for Burning Man, and as we keep 3 Old Men moving forward I expect to fill  more.  I love my notebooks.

Burning Man

Here’s the thing about Burning Man.  I planned for it, I got tickets for it, my application to be a theme camp was accepted, it was golden—and then we couldn’t go.  Undeterred, we pushed on to Alchemy and it was amazing.  Because we were so successful there, and because we intend to keep the band together for future regional burns, I’m counting this one as my most successful goal of the year.

Christmas Carol

The goal was to reconstruct the music for A Christmas Carol for Newnan Theatre Company’s revival of the show, the first in eleven years.  I did that.  I delivered a complete set of scores and parts, plus the script, back in August.  Due to the exigencies of community theatre, the production didn’t quite get the music back on its feet, but I got the job done.  We’ll see about next year.

Next up: 2015 goals!

Cocktails: the Sidecar

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Have I extolled the glories of the Sidecar recently?  What a wonderful little cocktail.

It’s simplicity itself:

Sidecar

  • 1-½ oz brandy or cognac (cognac is better)
  • 1 oz Cointreau or other orange liqueur
  • ¾ oz lemon juice (fresh is better)
  • sugar rim optional

Shake the ingredients with ice, pour into a sugar-rimmed cocktail glass.

That’s it.  The fun is substituting other substances for the Cointreau.

Here we see one variation, which uses apricot brandy instead of orange liqueur.  Quite tasty.

There’s also my own Swedish Sidecar, which uses Swedish Punsch.  It may interest long-time readers to know that I solved the problem of how to make salted caramel sugar for that particular cocktail.

That is all.  I have nothing profound to say, just liking this cocktail right now.

update: And just playing around, here’s another one:

Holiday Sidecar

  • 1-½ oz brandy or cognac
  • ½ oz orange curaçao
  • ½ oz Allspice Dram
  • ¾ oz lemon juice (fresh is better)

This one has a bright, spicy flavor that just tastes holiday-ish.  A plain sugar rim really adds to it.

And one more:

Blue Chocolate

  • 1-½ oz brandy or cognac
  • ½ oz blue curaçao
  • ½ oz Allspice Dram
  • ½ oz crème de cacao
  • ¾ oz lemon juice (fresh is better)

This one was a real surprise.

Genius!

Posted on by Dale

As probably none of you are aware, my lovely first wife has created a new cottage industry on my behalf, i.e., she told people I was selling goodies.  I think she thinks it will keep me off the streets.

This industry is called Fuzzy Labyrinth, and if you go look at the logo you’ll see why.

It started simply enough: the LFW asked me to make these yummy Parmesan Shortbreads with Fennel & Sea Salt for her coworkers for Christmas presents.  Of course, I couldn’t just put them on a plate—I had to design a gift box, complete with logo and label:

Isn’t that just hipster as hell?

Anyway, once people taste these things, they want more.  So for the last two weeks, I’ve been mixing and baking and printing and packaging these delicious little slices of addiction.  And selling them for $15/box, with 36 shortbreads in each box.  Amazing.

Here’s the most amazing thing about this, to me: I’ve been using these slats of wood that are 1/4″ thick to roll out the dough.  Pro tip: get thee to Home Depot and buy yourself some slats/lath/whatever, and then when recipes call for 1/2″, 1/4″, or Cthulhu help us, 1/8″ inch cookies, you got it made.  The slats I have are 1-1/4″ wide, so I was using those to slice the dough into strips, and then doubling that (2-1/2″) to get each piece.  The amazing thing is that these shortbreads then fit perfectly into those boxes, eight stacked on a side, pinwheel fashion, with room for the final four to stand in the center.  This made me happy throughout my dark soul.

The problem was that rolling out the dough, though made easier with the slats, was still a pain.  It took a while to roll it out, slice out some rectangles and bake them, then go back and reconfigure the dough at least two more times to squeeze as many pieces as I could out of a batch.  I always ended up with a little lumpen-shortbread which I was glad to devour instead of passing it off onto a customer.

So if I was going to be making a lot of these things—and it appears as if I will be—then I needed a way to make this automatic.  My calculations showed me that I could get 49 shortbreads out of each batch, i.e., a 7 x 7 grid.  I did some maths, and here is what I did today:

I went to Home Depot and bought a piece of Plexiglas, 1/4″ thick.  I wanted wood, but as you probably know most wood products are not actually their stated measurements.  Slats and lath are, but there were no pieces wider than 6″.  So Plexiglas it is.  In the above photo, you can see where I’ve started scoring it with the handy little tool I bought to do that with.

Once I got the piece I needed, I measured the inner frame, 8.75″ x 17.5″:

Here’s where my plan fell through:

I know enough to drill holes so you can get your jigsaw or sabre saw or hacksaw or whatever into the middle, so that was fine.  The problem was that I didn’t seem to have a jigsaw.  I had bought a hacksaw that actually could poke out and cut that, but  four or five strokes was enough to convince me that way madness lay.  Off to my friend Craig’s house, where you will remember I had him rabbet the grooves into my staff for 3 Old Men.  He has tools.

Back from Craig’s, I measured out on each side the markings for cutting the dough, then used the scoring tool to cut shallow grooves into the border.  Peel off the protective film, wash it, and we’re ready to go.

Here it is in its natural habitat, with a slab of chilled dough ready to be attacked:

And here’s a close-up of the etched markings:

And finally, here’s the final product:

Sweet Cthulhu, that was amazing.  Just roll that puppy out into the corners, cut the dough (using our old friends, the 1/4″ slats, as guides) and we’re ready to roll.  I cut a good 10-15 minutes off the time it takes me to get a batch produced!

Genius, I tell you!  Genius!