My next Show: Fefu and her Friends

Circles of the body

"Tony Orrico performs a graphite drawing of 8 circles. Each circle is drawn by four patterns consisting of 31.25 efforts each, 1,000 efforts total. The roll is measured by the torso and one arm. This event took place in 2009 at PlacMark, a residency and performance space in Hudson, New York.

Next show I"m in, Next show I am directing.....

A quick update, come see me sing in Murder in the Cathedral in September and then come see me direct Fefu and her Friends in November! See below for details on Murder....

Alec Duffy directs T.S. Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral

Don't miss Eliot's classic poetic drama in a dynamic, site-specific production at one of Brooklyn's most majestic cathedrals, featuring original music by composer Dave Malloy. Performances runSept. 16 - Oct. 2. Pictured: Godfrey L. Simmons, Jr.

Alarm bells in my brain....Is this okay?

Recently, students from Northwestern University in Illinois planned a terrorist attack. Researchers from the university were subsequently able to learn details of the attack, even though the students never admitted to anything. How was this possible? Well, essentially, the researchers read the students’ minds. More specifically, they monitored their P300 brain waves – brief electrical patterns in the cortex, which occur when meaningful information is presented to someone with “guilty knowledge.” In this case, it was a mock planned attack, but the research team believe their process could be used to prevent the real thing.

The study involved attaching electrodes to the students’ scalps, then presenting them with a number of stimuli on a computer monitor. Those stimuli included the names of cities such as Boston, Houston, New York, Chicago and Phoenix, shuffled and presented at random. In almost every case, the name of the location of the planned attack evoked the largest P300 responses.

"Without any prior knowledge of the planned crime in our mock terrorism scenarios, we were able to identify 10 out of 12 terrorists and, among them, 20 out of 30 crime-related details," said J. Peter Rosenfeld, professor of psychology in Northwestern's Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences. "The test was 83 percent accurate in predicting concealed knowledge, suggesting that our complex protocol could identify future terrorist activity."

Given that the students only had 30 minutes to hatch their dastardly plan, it is assumed that real terrorists, who would put much more time and effort into their plan, would give even stronger responses.

Of course, using technology to discern what people are thinking is nothing new. Besides the highly-controversial polygraph, people have experimented with lie detectors that read facial gestures, glasses that indicate lies through voice stress analysis, and voice stress reading devices for screening passengers at airports. Even P300 waves have been studied since the 1980s, although current technology has made them a more viable option.

"Since 9/11 preventing terrorism is a priority," Rosenfeld said. "Sometimes you catch suspicious people entering a building. You suspect that they're terrorists, and you have some leads from the chatter. You've heard they're going to attack one city or another in one fashion or another on one date or another. Our hope is that our new complex protocol – different from the first P300 technology developed in the 1980s – will one day confirm such chatter in the real world."

Farm to Folk fest in my neighborhood!

Venting may be not so good (from You are Not so Smart)

The Misconception: Venting your anger is an effective way to reduce stress and prevent lashing out at friends and family.

The Truth: Venting increases aggressive behavior over time.

Let it out. Don’t hold it all in. Left inside you, the anger will fester and spread, grow like a tumor, boil up until you punch holes in the wall or slam your car door so hard the windows shatter.

Those dark thoughts shouldn’t be tamped down inside your heart where they can condense and strengthen, where they form a concentrated stockpile of negativity which could reach critical mass at any moment.

Go get yourself one of those squishy balls and work it over with death grips. Use both hands and choke the imaginary life out of it.

Head to the gym and assault a punching bag. Shoot some people in a video game. Scream into a pillow.

Feel better?

Sure you do. Venting feels great.

The problem is, it accomplishes little else. Actually, it makes matters worse and primes your future behavior by fogging your mind.

It’s an old assertion, probably much older than Aristotle and Greek drama from which the word was cobbled from kathairein and kathoros, to purify and to clean.

Building tension, keeping the audience on the edge of their seats, and then releasing them right when they think they can’t take any more.

Releasing pent-up energy, or fluids, was Aristotle’s counter argument to Plato who felt poetry and drama filled people up with silliness and made them unbalanced.

Aristotle thought it went the other way, and by watching people go muck through a tragedy or rise to a victory you in the audience could vicariously release your tears or feel the rush of testosterone. You balanced out your heart by purging those emotions from the safety of your seat.

It seems to make sense, and that’s why the meme grafted itself to so much of human thought well before the great philosophers.

Releasing sexual tension feels good. Throwing up when you are sick feels good. Finally getting to a restroom feels good.

So, it seemed to follow, draining bad blood or driving out demons or siphoning away black bile to bring the body back into balance must be good medicine.

Be it an exorcism or a laxative, the idea is the same: get the bad stuff out and you’ll return to normal.

Balancing the humours – choleric, melancholic, phlegmatic and sanguine – was the basis of medicine from Hippocrates up to the Old West, and the way you balanced out often meant draining something.

Fast forward to Sigmund Freud.

Throughout the late 1800s and early 1900s, Freud was a superstar of science and pop-culture, and his work influenced everything from politics and advertising to business and art.

The turn of the century, 19th to 20th, was an interesting time to be a scientist devoted to the mind because there weren’t many tools available. It was sort of like being an astronomer before the invention of telescopes.

The rising stars in psychology made names for themselves by constructing elaborate theories of how the mind was organized and where your thoughts came from.

These psychonauts were pioneers, explorers on an undiscovered continent. Since the mind was completely unobservable, and they didn’t have much data to fall back on, their personal philosophies and conjectures tended to fill in the gaps.

Thanks to Freud, catharsis theory and psychotherapy became part of psychology. Mental wellness, he reasoned, could be achieved by filtering away impurities in your mind through the siphon of a therapist.

He believed your psyche was poisoned by repressed fears and desires, unresolved arguments and unhealed wounds. The mind formed phobias and obsessions around these bits of mental detritus. You needed to rummage around in there, open up some windows and let some fresh air and sunlight in.

The hydraulic model of anger is just what it sounds like – anger builds up inside the mind until you let off some steam. If you don’t let off this steam, the boiler will burst. If you don’t vent the pressure, someone is going to get a beating.

It sounds good. You may even look back on your life and remember times when you went batshit, punched a wall or broke a plate, and it made things better, but you are not so smart.

In the 1990s, Psychologist Brad Bushman at Iowa State decided to study whether or not venting actually worked.

At the time, self-help books were all the rage, and the prevailing advice when it came to dealing with stress and anger was to punch inanimate objects and scream into pillows.

Bushman, like many psychologists before him, felt like this might be bad advice.

In one of Bushman’s studies he divided 180 students into three groups. One read a neutral article. One read an article about a fake study which said venting anger was effective. The third group read about a fake study which said venting was pointless.

He then had the students write essays for or against abortion, a subject for which they probably had strong feelings. He told them the essays would be graded by fellow students, but they weren’t.

When they got their essays back, half were told their essay was superb.

The other half had this scrawled across the paper: “This is one of the worst essays I have ever read!”

They then asked the subjects to pick an activity like play a game, watch some comedy, read a story, or punch a bag.

The results?

The people who read the article which said venting worked, and who later got angry, were far more likely to ask to punch the bag than those who got angry in the other groups. In all the groups, the people who got praised tended to pick non-aggressive activities.

…exposure to media messages in support of catharsis can affect subsequent behavioral choices. Angry people expressed the highest desire to hit a punching bag when they had been exposed to a (bogus) newspaper article claiming that a good, effective technique for handling anger was to vent it toward an inanimate object.

- Brad Bushman, Roy Baymeister and Angela Stack, from the study on catharsis

So far so good. Belief in catharsis makes you more likely to seek it out.

Bushman decided to take this a step further and let the angry people seek revenge. He wanted to see if engaging in cathartic behavior would extinguish the anger, if it would be emancipated from the mind.

The second study was basically the same, except this time when subjects got back their papers with “This is one of the worst essays I have ever read!” they were divided into two groups.

The people in both groups were told they were going to have to compete against the person who graded their essay. One group first had to punch a bag, and the other group had to sit and wait for two minutes.

After the punching and waiting, the competition began.

The game was simple, press a button as fast as you can. If you lose, you get blasted with a horrible noise. When you win, blast your opponent. They could set the volume the other person had to endure, a setting between zero and 10 with 10 being 105 decibels.

Can you predict what they discovered?

On average, the punching bag group set the volume as high as 8.5. The timeout group set it to 2.47.

The people who got angry didn’t release their anger on the punching bag, it was sustained by it. The group which cooled off lost their desire for vengeance.

In subsequent studies where the subjects chose how much hot sauce the other person had to eat, the punching bag group piled it on. The cooled off group did not.

When the punching bag group later did word puzzles where they had to fill in the blanks to words like ch_ _e, they were more likely to pick choke instead of chase.

Bushman has been doing this research for a while, and it keeps turning up the same results.

If you think catharsis is good, you are more likely to seek it out when you get pissed. When you vent, you stay angry and are more likely to keep doing aggressive things so you can keep venting.

It’s drug-like, because there are brain chemicals and other behavioral reinforcements at work. If you get accustomed to blowing off steam, you become dependent on it.

The more effective approach is to just stop. Take your anger off of the stove. Let it go from a boil to a simmer to a lukewarm state where you no longer want to sink your teeth into the side of buffalo.

Bushman’s work also debunks the idea of redirecting your anger into exercise or something similar. He says it will only maintain your state or increase your arousal level, and afterward you may be even more aggressive than if you had cooled off.

Still, cooling off is not the same thing as not dealing with your anger at all. Bushman suggests you delay your response, relax or distract yourself with an activity totally incompatible with aggression.

These results contradict any suggestion that hitting the punching bag would have beneficial effects because one might feel better after doing so (which is what advocates of catharsis often say). People did indeed enjoy hitting the punching bag, but this was related to more rather than less subsequent aggression toward a person…hitting a punching bag does not produce a cathartic effect: It increases rather than decreases subsequent aggression.

- Brad Bushman, Roy Baymeister and Angela Stack, from the study on catharsis

Freud and Aristotle are superstars of our culture, of world culture. Aristotle’s ruminations on drama and Freud’s attestations about repressed emotions both linger and permeate popular thought.

You might think a total overturning of common sense would lead to widespread social change, but anger management is still big business – especially since it is often court-ordered.

If you get into an argument, or someone cuts you off in traffic, or you get called an awful name, venting will not dissipate the negative energy. It will, however, feel great.

That’s the thing. Catharsis will make you feel good, but it’s an emotional hamster wheel. The emotion which led you to catharsis will still be there afterward, and if it made you feel good, you’ll seek it out again in the future.

Video games, horror movies, romance novels – all fun, but no psychologist would prescribe these outlets as a cure for anger or fear or loneliness.

Flailing in a mosh pit or screaming along to death metal doesn’t release your demons, it prolongs your angst.

Smashing plates or kicking doors after a fight with a roommate, spouse or lover doesn’t redirect your fury, it perpetuates your rancor.

If you spank your children while infuriated, remember you are reinforcing something inside yourself.

Common sense says venting is an important way to ease tension, but common sense is wrong. Venting – catharsis – is pouring fuel into a fire.

Alan Moore's new Multimedia project

Make: Online : Google has a Great Glass Elevator; they call it "Liquid Galaxy"

Make: Online : Google has a Great Glass Elevator; they call it "Liquid Galaxy"

Megan Geckler

Megan Geckler

Faith vs Terrorism

We must learn to separate religious terrorism from the practice and promotion of a faith.

The Terrorist attacks were an extremist act. Much worse albeit, but akin to the extremism of burning crosses, lynchings or the murders of The Army of God.

Don't protest a Muslim community center in downtown New York just because it is represented by a faith. There are a couple of churches in downtown NY that seem to practice and promote their faith without terror.

It makes me sick to my stomach the ignorance of blanketed and uneducated thought.

Responses to Spike Jonze, "I'm Here"

Scott Pilgrim Fans, check it out.

Make: Online : Crossroads (what to do) by Garvin Nolte

Make: Online : Crossroads (what to do) by Garvin Nolte

Star Wars on my neighborhood train!!!!!

Mario Bros on Violin

raining on my parade

I had an emotionally moving conversation last night that has made me question two principals that I believe I hold inside:

1. Nobody wants to hear about it when you're sad

2. It's better to have a "can do" positive attitude than to admit you are sad and lonely.

Okay, so everybody gets sad. And it isn't bad to be sad. But in American culture, it is inappropriate to share your sadness. "don't bring everybody down"

Our valuable American "can do!" spirit is wonderful for achieving great things in a short time, but makes it difficult to admit perhaps you feel that you "can't do" or may not "be able to do".

I suffer sometimes from a loneliness in the city that I just swallow as my own pity party. (well, technically, it's not a pity party because no one but me is invited....) But sometimes admitting that you are sad and afraid makes it possible for you to achieve something because you can acknowledge the task is difficult and then soldier on.

hmmm....

flowing with the moment...

Horoscope today:

"You may be inclined to cancel the impulsive invitations you sent out for an upcoming party at your house. Or perhaps you wish that you could skip a social engagement and just stay home. But you'll regret changing your mind so close to the event; instead, follow through with your existing plans. Once you start flowing with the moment, you'll remember why you were excited about the activity in the first place."

Essentially, don't be a nerd. Get out of the house. Unless you are getting out of your house to do something nerdy.

And what the...can you get more "new age" than the phrase - "flowing with the moment".

:)

Mobiles and projections

Exquisite Bodies, documentation of video sculpture by Amy Youngs and Ken Rinaldo from Amy Youngs on Vimeo.

Going Mouseless

Make: Online : Invisible computer mouse is perfect accessory for mimes

From the creative mind that thought up the Sixth Sense, here is the invisible mouse.

More ways to interface with a computer physically.

The Forer Effect. The beginning of this blog entry from "you are not so smart" hooked me.

http://youarenotsosmart.com/2010/06/29/subjective-validation/

The Misconception: You are skeptical of generalities.

The Truth: You are prone to believing vague statements and predictions are true, especially if they are positive and address you personally.

Based on the data I’ve collected from the comments, emails and other browsing information generated by this blog, I have a pretty good idea of who you are.

Here are my findings:

You have a need for other people to like and admire you, and yet you tend to be critical of yourself.

While you have some personality weaknesses you are generally able to compensate for them.

You have considerable unused capacity that you have not turned to your advantage. Disciplined and self-controlled on the outside, you tend to be worrisome and insecure on the inside.

At times you have serious doubts as to whether you have made the right decision or done the right thing.

You prefer a certain amount of change and variety and become dissatisfied when hemmed in by restrictions and limitations. You also pride yourself as an independent thinker; and do not accept others’ statements without satisfactory proof. But you have found it unwise to be too frank in revealing yourself to others.

At times you are extroverted, affable, and sociable, while at other times you are introverted, wary, and reserved.

Some of your aspirations tend to be rather unrealistic.

Does this sound accurate? Does it describe you?

It should. It describes everyone.

All the above statements came from a 1948 experiment by Bertram R. Forer. He gave his students a personality test and told them each one had been personally assessed, but then gave everyone the same analysis.

He asked his students to look over the statements and rate them for accuracy. On average, they rated the bogus results as 85 percent correct – as if they had been personally prepared to describe them.

The block of text above was actually a mishmash of lines from horoscopes collected by Forer for the experiment.

The tendency to believe vague statements designed to appeal to just about anyone is called the Forer Effect, and psychologists point to this phenomenon to explain why people fall for pseudoscience like biorhythms, iridology and phrenology or mysticism like astrology, numerology and tarot cards.

The Forer Effect is part of larger phenomenon psychologists refer to as subjective validation, which is a fancy way of saying you are far more vulnerable to suggestion when the subject of the conversation is you.

Since you are always in your own head, thoughts about what it means to be you take up a lot of mental space.

With some cultural variations, most people are keen on being an individual, a unique and special person whose hopes and dreams and fears and doubts are all their own.

If you have the means, you personalize everything: your car tag, your ring tone, your computer’s desktop wallpaper, your bedroom’s walls.

Everything around you says something about your personality. Cultivating an incomparable self either through consumption or creation is not something you take lightly.

Yet, somewhere between nature and nurture, we are all far more similar than you think.

Genetically, you and your friends are almost identical. Those genes create the brain which generates the mind from which your thoughts spring. Thus, genetically, your mental life is as similar to everyone else’s as the feet in your shoes.

Culturally, we differ. Our varying experiences in our varying environments shape us. Still, deep below, we are the same, and the failure to notice this can be exploited.

We don’t want to hear negative things about ourselves. If someone says to you “you’re a very honest person, but it takes people a while to really get to know you” then you’re almost certainly going to agree, because it’s not negative in any way. Turn that around and say the opposite – “you’re deceptive and people can read you like an open book” is awful. No one wants to hear that, it makes him or her sound shallow and evil.

- Paul Michael, advertising guru

If a statement is ambiguous and you think it addresses you directly, you will boil away the ambiguity by finding ways to match the information up with your own traits. You think back to all the time spent figuring out who you are, dividing your qualities from the qualities of others, and apply the same logic.

Here’s an excerpt from a real horoscope at horoscopes.com: “At some point during the day, you might have the feeling that you aren’t working hard enough to keep the forward motion going, and you might feel panic rise. This could prove a good motivating factor, but you don’t need to push yourself harder than you’re going now. You’re on a roll and it’s likely to continue. Just pace yourself.”

Now, here’s another one from the same source on the same day but a different sign: “Don’t be too hard on yourself if you’re dragging a little toward the end of the day. You’ll be able to recharge your batteries before tomorrow. In the evening, relax at home with a good book.”

Seen straight on, horoscopes describe the sort of things we all experience, but pluck one from the bunch, turn it ever so slightly, and you will see the details, the accuracy. If you believe you live under a sign, and the movement of the planets can divine your future, a general statement becomes specific.

Source: Lodestar Astrology

It is the the hope which gives subjective validation its power. If you want the psychic to be real, or the sacred stones to forecast the unknown, you will find a way to believe them even when they falter.

When you want to believe something, when you need something to be true, you will look for patterns; you connect the dots like the stars of a constellation. You will take the random and give it purpose, transmutate the chaotic into the systemic, see chance as fate.

Your brain abhors disorder. You find patterns where there are none, see faces in clouds, demons in bonfires.

Those who claim the powers of divination hijack these natural human tendencies. They know they can depend on you to use subjective validation in the moment and confirmation bias afterward. They expect you will see yourself in a mirror of a thousand faces, and then later on you see only the things which validate that reflection.

The natural human tendencies to seek order in chaos and believe in generalities both get enhanced when the information supposedly pertains to you, when it is personal.

In the 1990s, The Psychic Friends network used subjective validation to earn yearly revenues topping $115 million.

I would always come out and tell them at the beginning, “Look, I am going to do something here but I’m not claiming any special powers, although I have practiced this a lot, so you decide what is going on here.” And with this I never got challenged. I was always considered a mind reader. After every show, and I was just a little kid, these women would take me aside and tell me about their personal lives and I was blushing, and they wanted a private reading with me. I realized that I only needed to get one little fact about them and they would attribute all kinds of powers to me.

- Ray Hyman from an interview conducted by Michael Shermer in Skeptic

The psychologist Ray Hyman has spent most of his life studying the art of deception.

Before he entered the halls of science, he worked as a magician and then moved on to mentalism after discovering he could make more money reading palms than performing card tricks.

The crazy thing about Hyman’s career as a palm reader is, like many psychics, over time he began to believe he actually did have psychic powers. The people who came to him were so satisfied, so bowled over, he thought he must have a real gift.

Subjective validation cuts both ways.

Hyman was using a technique called cold reading where you start with the wide-angle lens of generalities and watch the other person for cues so you can constrict the iris down to what seems like a powerful insight into the other person’s soul. It works because people tend to ignore the little misses and focus on the hits.

As he worked his way through college, another mentalist, Stanley Jaks, took Hyman aside and saved him from delusion by asking him to try something new – tell people the opposite of what he believed their palms revealed.

The result? They were just as flabbergasted by his abilities, if not more so.

Cold reading was powerful, but tossing it aside he was still able to amaze.

Hyman realized what he said didn’t matter as long as his presentation was good. The other person was doing all the work, tricking themselves, seeing the general as the specific just like in the Forer Effect.

Mediums and palm readers, those who speak for the dead or see into the beyond for cash, depend on subjective validation.

Remember, your capacity to fool yourself is greater than the abilities of any conjurer, and conjurers come in many guises.

You are a creature impelled to hope, yearning for answers. As you attempt to make sense of the world you focus on what falls into place and neglect that which doesn’t fit, and there is so much in life which does not fit.

When you see a set of horoscopes, read all of them.

When someone claims they can see into your heart, realize all our hearts are much the same.

Make: Online : Klamath Kinetic Challenge 2010 event coverage

Make: Online : Klamath Kinetic Challenge 2010 event coverage

This event occured in my small hometown in Oregon.

I'm rather proud!

Netherlands' Rafael van der Vaart kicks between the legs of Cameroon's Aurelien Chedjou during a Group E soccer match at Green Point stadium in Cape T

Netherlands' Rafael van der Vaart kicks between the legs of Cameroon's Aurelien Chedjou during a Group E soccer match at Green Point stadium in Cape Town June 24, 2010. (REUTERS/Jerry Lampen)

Entertained and moved

Last night I saw a show that not only delighted and entertained me but it engaged my intellect and made me think about my culture in a new way.

Please check out The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity.

It is innovative theater and a damn good show.

Two Clever Animations that delight me...

The T-Shirt War from Ibrahim Nergiz on Vimeo.

Sorry I'm Late from Tomas Mankovsky on Vimeo.

today....

The Soul of your Smile: A Duchenne Smile

Psychologists call a genuine smile a Duchenne Smile after Guillaume-Benjamin-Amand Duchenne de Boulogne, whose place in history is derived by his passion for shocking people in the face.

Duchenne lived in Paris and zapped people throughout the mid-1800s in an attempt to figure out whether or not the muscles of the face were connected to the soul. He defined and catalogued the eye muscles that are connected to authentic smiling.

-From "You are not so Smart" blog- Real or fake smiling. Involuntary or voluntary? “Most people are surprisingly bad at spotting fake smiles. One possible explanation for this is that it may be easier for people to get along if they don’t always know what others are really feeling.” - BBC Science and Nature Website.

The muscles which control the cheeks and the muscles which control the eyes get switched on and off by different parts of your brain. The parts of your brain which make up the conscious, in-control you are the same parts which can yank at your mouth and fake a smile. Real smiles include the muscles around the eyes, which are harder to control and thus are less likely to squinch up when you are committing grin fraud. A BBC test you can take online here to see how good you are at spotting real and fake smiles.

Make: Online : Drumbrella sings The Doom Song

Make: Online : Drumbrella sings The Doom Song

NASA Satellites' view of Gulf oil spill | Reporting with a camera

Barbie as elderly. She still looks great.

Creepy Awesome - Galileo's finger on Display

This is how to interface (just in 5 years)

Packing tape Spiderweb...amazing

Self-arranging Ikea furniture

Make: Online : Self-arranging Ikea furniture

Ikea Robotics - "marketing" video from adam lassy on Vimeo.

Make It So, Sir Patrick Stewart - The Captain is knighted

Make It So, Sir Patrick Stewart - Film School Rejects

I was slightly surprised that he hadn't been already knighted.

New favorite thing I gotta go see..

http://observatoryroom.org/

Delightful

heard on the street...

If I find something that I love, I will wear it's pants off.

Performing underwater **NERDIRIFIC!!**

Fefu and her friends by Maria Irene Fornes

Cecilia: We must be part of a community, perhaps 10,100, 1000. It depends on how strong you are. ...A common denominator must be reached. Thoughts, emotions that fit all, have to be limited to a small number. That is, I feel, the concern of the educator--to teach how to be sensitive to the differences in ourselves as well as outside ourselves...Otherwise the unusual in us will perish. As we grow we feel we are strange and fear any thought that is not shared with everyone."

The play was written in 1977 and set in 1935. It speaks to me in relation to the battle for connection to other people, women specifically. Connection to a female community.

My brain thinks of facebook, social networking. Somehow I feel the feelings are parallel.

Improve Everywhere at the New York Public Library

Delight in the Appaulling

I have a maniacal love for ads that today are just SO wrong.

http://weburbanist.com/2010/05/18/old-school-vintage-ads-were-glad-are-gone/

Wonderful Game: Record Tripping

http://www.recordtripping.com/

Fifty Dangerous Things (You Should Let Your Children Do)

Fifty Dangerous Things (You Should Let Your Children Do)

I saw this guy on TED. He talks about how we can't shelter our kids as there are dangerous things worth learning to do.

I have no kids, so I don't understand the fear a parent has for their children, but I think kids should learn these things.

I love this....

"Why Don't You Love Me" - Beyoncé from Beyoncé on Vimeo.

Pilobolus

Amazing Photos: Dance around the World

http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2009/06/dance_around_the_world.html

http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2009/06/dance_around_the_world.html

BWW Special Feature: 99 and Under the Radar, Indie Theatre's Movers and Shakers 2010/04/09

BWW Special Feature: 99 and Under the Radar, Indie Theatre's Movers and Shakers 2010/04/09

Authenticating Eileen Reviewed!!

"...every once and awhile a group executes the experiential production in such a way that it is entirely effective and thought-provoking. Tin Lily's Authenticating Eileen does this with intelligence and panache."

old friends

I had a dream last night I was in an attic with an old friend. We sat across from each other cross legged and there was a deep aching to embrace. But as one moved toward the other, the distance was maintained, our bodies levitating away from each other and neither of us could penetrate the space. There was a point or fulcrum between us that we both revolved around but couldn't move closer to. The aching remained but the distance was accepted as appropriate. We stared. I felt I was holding back tears so as not to spoil the time. Symbols appeared permanently burned at the skin in the hollow below our necks but indecipherable. Perhaps this was the reason for the separation, but I didn't know.

I woke with a profound sadness and the feeling I had done something wrong. But the show I am working on, daily schedule, and the rush of the present quickly regained my emotions.

nature by Numbers

I remember being in love with this film they showed in elementary about how nature and math were seamless. i never really liked math, because it was just pointless calculation in school. But that film made it something that really existed. Filmmaker Cristóbal Vila produced this short animation, called Nature By Numbers, which shows examples of how mathematical relationships such as the Fibonacci sequence, golden ratio, and the Delaunay triangulationcan be found in the natural world.

Enjoy!

Nature by Numbers from Cristóbal Vila on Vimeo.

Authenticating Eileen Opens on Friday!!

Portraying Lesbian Parents

Portraying Lesbian Parents

Authenticating Eileen Opens March 26

A Song from "Authenticating Eileen" #1 from Karim Muasher on Vimeo.

Authenticating Eileen - Sneak Peek. Opens March 26

A Song from "Authenticating Eileen" #2 from Karim Muasher on Vimeo.

Lonely with everybody around

I live in one of the most populated cities in the world. But within this city, I have seen and experienced the most prolific solitude of my life. Not only personally have I felt the most individualized and lonely, but on the streets of New York, I have seen the mask of loneliness and solitude crafted on so many people. I don't think I understood what loneliness is until I lived in this city.

New York is about going after an individual goal. Most, almost all, of the wonderful people that I have met are all here because they made a decision to do something big in their life, they are committed to creating something bigger than themselves, achieving a goal, chasing a dream, proving something to themselves or others. This is a kinship that is shared within this city. But at times, the pursuit of something - all of the chasing, proving, achieving, and creating can have the side effect of loneliness.

But loneliness is a word with such indication. It's definition, sound and even the look of the word, two l's standing high amongest a mess of smaller case letters, is sad and slightly pitiful. At times, yes, it is the right word for how I feel in this city. But in this post, i think a better word is solitude.

The side effect of exploration right now for me is......solitude.

And I'd rather not judge that as good or bad.

Dance around the World

A competitor dressed as Superman looks dejected as he takes part in the Tough Guy 2010 race on January 31, 2010.

Aline Smithson photographer

I've fallen in love with the photography of Aline Smithson. Wit, simple, and very full.

Check out the "Arrangement in Green and Black: Portrait of the photographer's mother series"

Iris Schieferstein

Iris Schieferstein

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Suitcase Chairs by Katie Thompson

Suitcase Chairs by Katie Thompson

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