Random creations
Did a lot more work at school on the 100 Book Club blog. Played around with a visual for the winter banners in Man in the Marmalade Hat. Pursued budgeting issues for William Blake’s Inn.
And of course tonight we have the Masterworks Chorale concert, so a performance will have to count as my creativity.
I decided to take a break from the sunflowers. That way, maybe I can revisit them with a fresh ear and learn where I can pare them down.
Instead, I did a great deal of playing with the 100 Book Club blog. I got the entire List (some 800 titles) exported from FileMaker Pro in batches (by AR™ reading level), sucked up into DreamWeaver and modified, and then copied to Drupal webpages. Tedius, but not difficult. So that’s done.
I’ve been working on examples of forums and comments, but that hasn’t turned out like I thought, and I don’t have time to play with at the moment: we have a dress rehearsal with Masterworks Chorale for tomorrow night’s concert.
No, never fear, I am not starting another blog. At least, not one for me, and not one that you will ever read. Today I worked on the Newnan Crossing 100 Book Club blog. We’ve been trying to get it up and running since October, and on Monday I decided that it was time to implement it whether it was exactly in the shape I wanted it or not. After all, it was ready for me to put students in as users, and they would each have their own blog.
I had originally wanted to use the multi-user version of WordPress, called WordPress MU, but apparently there were installation issues. (All the tech end of this is being handled by the school system’s IT people, specifically Mike. He’s been great.) So we switched to Drupal, with which I have been unfamiliar.
WordPress is a dedicated blogging software package. Drupal is a “content management system,” whatever that means. All I know is that it has a lot more buttons to push and boxes to check to make it do what you want it to do, and sometimes those boxes and buttons are distributed in non-intuitive ways.
Anyway, I got all the kids put in, with nifty passwords that look random but actually are rememberable for the kid. I got it to look like a nice place to be. And we’re ready to start training the 8-10 year-olds how to blog.
The idea is that they read a book from a preselected list of award-winners or starred reviews, then blog about their reading. I’ve trained them (although I have no doubt that training was shallow and noneffective in 80% of them) not to write about the book, but about their reading.
After they post, then I and the other Book Club members can comment on it. Lo, a conversation about reading occurs. Children, these are advanced readers, who otherwise would be zooming through “short books” and racking up AR™ points just to rack up AR™ points are now thinking about what they’re reading. They’re making predictions. They’re discussing an author’s use of language. They’re deciding what makes a book good. And they’re learning, most importantly, to write.
If this works, I shall be called blessed.
Amazingly I was quite creative today.
At school, I finished the hearing impaired morning announcement video. Everyone thinks I’m just grand to have accomplished it, and I guess Final Cut Express looks impressive enough to dazzle most people. Actually, I did do a good job with it. It looks very nice.
I received confirmation that the Cultural Arts Commission is in agreement to help us out with William Blake, although I think their support at this point is still a little fuzzy. No matter, it’s enough to move forward with. I called and confirmed the dates of April 29-May 3 for rehearsals and performance at Wadsworth Auditorium. I am to write a letter to the mayor and city council referencing the Cultural Arts Commision and Global Achievers and our ties to Scotland, asking for a waiver of all fees for the space.
Bette Hickman, our intrepid producer, wants to make it open to the public, and I had come to the same conclusion. This could be a really big thing.
I got email done to all our participants, informing them of our new successive approximations.
I got a couple more measures of the Sunflower Waltz scored.
I worked on the official proposal for the Cultural Arts Commission.
I created Lacuna stationery.
I started a storyboard for Sun & Moon Circus.
That should be enough, don’t you think?
Lots going on today. First of all, I videotaped our hearing impaired students saying the Pledge of Allegiance for their announcements for Friday morning. It’s Exceptional Children’s Week, and all week students from different areas have been leading the pledge and also telling about famous people in the past who were or would have been in special needs classes. One of the hearing impaired students signed a couple of paragraphs about Helen Keller.
Their teachers originally wanted to narrate the video, but I dissuaded them. Well, OK, I forbade them. This is the kids’ moment, and I told the teachers I would close caption the video. What about the little kids who can’t read, they asked. Their teachers will read it to them, I pointed out.
Anyway, I spent a lot of the day editing the video in Final Cut Express, structuring it like the morning announcements, putting cheesy “news” music under the lead-ins, close captioning the Pledge and the Helen Keller bit. I even put photos of Helen Keller over the shoulder of the student, cross-fading between each one.
At Lacuna workshop (Dale, Marc, Laura, Melissa, and Carol Lee in attendance), we were productive as usual, although in a different way this week. I brought my worries about the calendar to the table, and we hashed that out. Part of my worries has to do with not knowing whether we have a place to perform this, and we talked about that. I know that our producing arm is working on it, but it makes me very anxious not to know.
To make a long evening short, we decided to keep working Tuesday nights (7:30 for those who would like to join us) for the rest of March, getting together our design concepts and choreographing the two staged pieces.
The first week of April is spring break, and many of us will be in New York City. And I don’t think I’ve mentioned that we will be having lunch with Nancy Willard! She’s coming down from Poughkeepsie, and we get to meet her! I’m still excited about that.
Then, starting April 10, we will meet Tuesdays and Wednesdays and begin dragging in the casts of Man in the Marmalade Hat and Two Sunflowers. Actually, on April 10, we’ll invite the members of the chorus to come and work on a little blocking/physicalization of their part of this thing.
Sometime in April, we’ll hold a weekend color-cut-and-paste session where we can build and paint stuff we need all at once.
We buckled down and got our What We Need and Who We Need done for Man in the Marmalade Hat. (Lurkers, there’s lots you can do. More than enough. Get to work.)
We realized that at some point we need to storyboard Sun & Moon Circus so we can deliberately produce visuals for the multimedia part of the concert. I also shared that I had envisaged staging “production photos” of that and other pieces for the multimedia, i.e., photo a kid tossing up a planet balloon and use that as a visual.
Carol Lee had done a different successive approximation of a sunflower, one using a glove. We’re still undecided between the glove and the crossbar on manipulating the sunflowers. She will work on those this week.
Laura wants to work on a prototype for the hedgehog costume. (Dale will start working with Laura’s mom’s kindergarten hedgehogs this week.)
Marc will work on design concepts for the Inn itself. We did decide that for May, we can get away with simple suggestions.
Dale will work on prototypes for the Toast Heads (the MMH’s marching band).
Melissa, were you working on something? I didn’t write it down.
Everyone is to work on visuals for the winter/spring motifs for the MMH’s banners.
I spent the whole day in my media center, surrounded by reading caves for Read Across America Day. As you all know, March 2 is Dr. Seuss’s birthday, and this year was the 50th anniversary of The Cat in the Hat.
This is my media center with reading caves. Everything you see here was built by teachers and their minions on Thursday afternoon. In the foreground is the circus tent, with the Mulberry St. House behind it. Beyond that you see the houses of the Three Little Pigs, and behind that, the Wardrobe that leads into Narnia. In the very back is a starry night campground.
Right behind the Mulberry House is Hogwarts, and you cannot see the pirate ship behind that. Also invisible, beyond Narnia, is Mr. Tumnus’s cave, and to the right, out of the frame, is a beach and under the sea.
Here are some young Gryffindors reading inside Hogwarts. 
You can see the portraits in the stairwell. Behind the camera is the Great Hall, and under that is Slytherin’s commons room. I took the opportunity to dress up as Snape and snarl at children all day. A couple of kids actually, and correctly, addressed me as “Professor Snape.” I also identified every redheaded child as a Weasley, although I think only one was old enough to get it.
It was pretty amazing day. Kids would go nuts when they saw the transformation of the media center, and we’d give them five minutes to explore before settling down to read for about fifteen minutes. There was room for two classes at a time, although I think with a little judicious placement we could have handled three at a time.
Everyone’s favorite of the day was Mr. Tumnus’s cave. It was very cozy, and the way they used the actual shelves was quite witty. Believe it or not, that was a conscious design decision on the part of the young ladies who put it together Thursday afternoon.
All in all, a very good day. Everyone’s reaction was so positive that we decided to leave everything up until Monday afternoon. Many wanted to leave it up all week, but it shuts down the media center, as you can imagine, and we just can’t be closed that long.
It’s a Monday, which means all I’ve had time to do is Masterworks Chorale rehearsal. Still I did get a phone call in to Multec, the local packaging company who has always been willing to give me cardboard when I needed it. Tomorrow I’ll pick up enough cardboard to make the Hogwarts reading cave.
I need to remember to bring my tempera paints on Thursday.
Here we are at Day 200. Feels like it should be a goalpost of some kind.
Oh well. Today was the first day of my winter break, so I took this opportunity to do a little computer maintenance. I haven’t been working on my music much since getting the new computer, a delicious irony, I’m sure, because Finale 2007 has not functioned smoothly with the Garritan Personal Orchestra sounds. I decided to fall back on Finale 2006 until GPO is finally updated, but then it wouldn’t work because the authorization didn’t travel from the old laptop to the new one.
So I started the day with that issue, and it didn’t take long to fix. I haven’t had time to play with Finale 2006 to see if it’s all OK, but maybe I’ll do that tomorrow.
Then I began to update WordPress, the software that runs this blog. That went smoothly, updating both this blog and the Lacuna blog. You will also notice the new look to this blog. That was a new theme uploaded yesterday, and I liked it.
Then it got messy. I wanted to move the Lacuna blog over to lacunagroup.org, and then split it into two blogs, one for general Lacuna use, the other for Marc’s theatre training stuff. Easier said than done. Moving was not too difficult, but then things went squirrelly. The blog still functions, and Marc’s new blog seems to work, but the admin pages were incomplete. That’s where you actually write the blog posts, edit stuff, import all of Marc’s stuff from the Lacuna blog, etc. Pieces were missing, and I can’t make them show up. I got stymied at that point. I was supposed to do our taxes today too, but I worked off and on all day on getting WordPress to show me its stuff. Reminds me of my dating days.
Otherwise, the only other thing I did, not especially creative either, was to visit a travel agent and try to start piecing together the Honea/Lyles/Shankel trip to New York. I’ll spare you the details.
Another source of ideas for William Blake, this one pure serendipity.
We were sharing with Marc and Mary Frances about our trip to L.A., and I happened to mention that apparently some of the women in the group thought that James Conlon, the music director of L.A. Opera, was good-looking. I googled him and found several images of him. Not bad. But one of the images led me to Tobias Picker’s website, an American composer the premiere of whose American Tragedy Conlon had conducted.
And there’s where I found this image:
Aha! I cried and shared with everyone else. This is a possible solution to the Inn: bilevel, with sliding panels. I’ll do some sketches this week and play with the idea.
Today I also tided up around the Lacuna website and my own, especially, the What I’m Reading Now bits.
Last Friday, we went to L.A. to visit with friends, many of whom we had not seen for many years. The specific occasion was the opening of Kurt Weil’s The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny at the L.A. Opera. It starred Patti Lupone and Audra Macdonald and was directed by an old schoolmate, John Doyle. You may remember John Doyle from his winning the Tony last year for Sweeney Todd, also starring Ms. Lupone.
Mahagonny is supposedly the pinnacle of the brief but fruitful collaboration of Weill and Bertolt Brecht, which also produced The Threepenny Opera. Brecht’s theory of theatre was basically political. He wanted you not to be involved emotionally with the characters of his work, but to be completely alienated from that attachment and to think about the ideas he was putting on stage, all of which were Marxist.
Sometimes this worked, sometimes it didn’t. It works best when, against his will, he gives you characters to care about and root for and then breaks out of that framework to force you to examine their moral/political situation.
Mahagonny was not one of these times. Originally a set of poems about a completely immoral pleasure city where the only sin is to be poor, it has little plot and such a total inconsistency of character development that there’s precious little to be alienated from. Weil’s music is not especially tuneful, though I found it to be mostly interesting.
L.A. Opera struggled mightily with the piece. Singers were topnotch, as was the orchestra. Set, costume, and lighting design were first-rate. Direction was consistent, but not illuminating. In fact, I have never seen such a static production ever, and I watch opera for fun. It didn’t work.
We knew all this going in. We skipped the preshow lecture, because, after all, we have degrees in theatre. We can verfremdung with the best of them. What we were hoping for out of the evening was something new that would force us to pay attention to the ideas. We did not get it.
Afterwards, what does one say to a world-famous director when the show sat there like a lump in one’s stomach?, John said that the hardest thing was getting the political content to shock, which it definitely had not. I suggested that the biggest problem with the piece altogether was that the ideas are no longer shocking: untrammeled capitalism is not a good thing, the poor are economic victims, tomorrow is not another day. We know these things to be true; they are part of the popular culture, and trotting them out as terrible simply no longer works.
Case in point: the next day, as Mike Funt was driving us pell-mell down Laurel Canyon Blvd, Bailee Desrocher laughed at how the hill residences (perched precariously on their mud-slides-to-be) reminded her of the cartoon show The Oblongs, in which a deformed family lives at the bottom of the hill, and the pollution from the rich above them sinks down to them. (Her point was that on smoggy mornings, you could see where the smog stopped; the rich live above that line.)
But there you have it. When Brecht’s ideas are part of a friggin’ cartoon show, how can you hope to pretend that they are shocking? And if they’re not shocking, and the script in question is no more than a set of polemical texts, and the music is not pretty on the surface, then what do you have to work with? I guess I would try to dazzle the audience with elaborate directorial choices, so at least they could say my efforts were interesting, entertaining, or even pretty. But John, for whatever reason, did not do that.
I would have made the stage smaller, too. So there.
What does this all have to do with us? More tomorrow.