The all-knowing Harry Knowles dishes about every film due in 2001, via BrainLog.
by krisis
I just had my first rehearsal for Good Woman of Setzuan, but it was more of an exercise in movement than a practice. We did a lot of walking… i must have walked for nearly twenty minutes, just examining the way i use my weight and how i can shift it to change the look of my character. During the walking our director Bill actually singled out my character as an example of someone who moves in a specific way (not that i was moving that way), so at once i was psyched and a bit intimidated. After the walking we paired off and moved somewhat interpretively to music. My two favourite motions were: 1 – with a new person where i was sort of courting her and we conducted almost the whole thing with eye contact and the tips of our fingers, 2 – with Laurel, where i was tiptoeing around the stage and she was mimicking me carefully, after which we switched roles. The other interesting tid-bit of information came as we discussed some of the production numbers… i innocently asked if Laurel or Ben would be joining into my song and Bill turned to me and said matter-of-factly “No, it’s a solo,” which shut me up pretty fast. I’m not entirely sure if i want to be playing guitar for it or not… as playing guitar tends to lock me into to certain vocal inflections more than singing without it. Either way, i thought it would be nice to combine my voice with that of Ben and/or Laurel (who are the other two characters in the scene), but apparently i have to go it alone.
I tend to move about a year or so behind big web trends. For example, i held off from using frames as a main design element until 1998, when they had already become quite passé. Similarly, i only utilize minimal amounts of JS, just recently began to use tables to better define my pages’ space, and now have begun to use Server Side Includes. Fun, aren’t i? Part of the issue is that i usually hang onto an old browser until the new version becomes the web-standard so that i’m not tempted to immediately design above the display abilities of the browsers that visit me. Being a former Netscape enthusiast (until it outright wouldn’t work and displayed every page i liked to read incorrectly) i never was too aquainted with the beautiful effects of Cascading Style Sheets because Netscape doesn’t display them correctly. Of course, by now any web designer with half a brain is using CSS whereas i can just barely understand what they’re up to when i check out the code. In the end this is all a facet of my DIY (do it yourself) stubborness; i almost totally refuse to let other people lay a hand on my web designs as much as i shun other people’s input into my music. Sure, i might get better even faster if i would open myself up to direct influence more often, but then i would lose the right to claim that my work was all my own. As it is, when someone complements me on this site i know that the only person to thank is me (well.. the folks at blogger as well, but that’s a given) in the same way that i’m the only person to be credited for the overwhelming majority of my songs. So, if you had ever wondering why i’m just a backwards redneck about webdesign, that’s why. Have a nice day.
Ok… i just switched Crushing over to shtml so that i can use SSI and so far it’s running smoothly. The question is… do i leave all my old perma-links the same and let the old html archives stay up? Or, do i change all the perma-links to reflect the shtml and then change all the old HTML archives to redirect pages to point people to the new ones? Ugh…
Please pardon any idiocy you may encounter while i switch over to .shtml documents. Thank you.