OhboyOhboyOhboy

Sneak peak at the new Yankee stadium. Sorry about the annoying ads at the start.

LOHud Yankee Report

Some folks are asking what was wrong with the old stadium? Lets put it this way. Imagine you've got a choice of working a show in an older Broadway house. The FOH is gorgeous but backstage is fairly outdated and small. You spend your free time in the plenum and your coat is hanging up in the hallway. The bathrooms are nasty and the walk up to dressing rooms or follow spot positions is heart attack inducing.

Then you've got an opportunity to work at the Met. FOH is beautiful, just like a Broadway house. But backstage is a different story. Big stage, loading doors, elevators onstage and off, shop areas, lounges, a space designed for theatrical production in mind.

Where would you rather work?

Also a blog by Phil Hughes

Just Living Is Not Enough...

One must have sunshine, freedom, and a little flower. Hans Christian Anderson

One of the advantages of a little down time (hopefully very little) is finding out what’s up on daytime television. A little goes a long way. Jerry, Steve and Maury seem to have some pretty good gigs, all indoor work and no heavy lifting involved. Brow beating the helpless, hopeless and harebrained is always good fun. The shows help grown men to keep in touch with their inner adolescent and make a living at it.

One of the bright spots is Versus , the old Outdoor Life Network. It’s a guy thing. Not owned by a sports team, the channel takes a broader approach to it’s programming. Hockey, cycling and college basketball are the main team sports features. It’s here you can watch the Tour de France and other bike races in the US and abroad. There is also programming about things like hunting, fishing, wildlife management and maintenance of hunting plots and fishing areas. Catch and release is the standard in the fishing shows but be warned about the hunting shows. They don’t hesitate to show large animals being taken by gunfire or arrows and looked at as trophies. If seeing that bothers you then the watch something else.

Two of the best of the hunting shows are Escape To The Wild and Life In The Open . The Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership is a group that is working to keep wild areas and government properties open to the hunter and fishermen, promotes responsible energy development and wildlife habitat management. They also have a program that is called the Union Sportsman Alliance , a dues-based, hunting and fishing club of the TRCP and its partner unions, designed exclusively for union members and their families that hunt, fish and enjoy the outdoors. Polls revealed that 70% of all union members hunt and fish and do not belong to any formal conservation or outdoor organization. I consider NRA to be an industry trade group for the promotion and sale of firearms and ammunition and not concerned with conservation. Promoting safe marksmanship is important but the mission of TRCP and the NRA are different. You can shoot on a range but you can only hunt in the wild.

While most of the work that TRCP is doing is based on the West and Midwest, there is a show City Limits has a professional fisherman trying to catch the legal limit of fish within major US cities, including NYC, DC and Chicago.

The Nature Conservancy reports that outdoor activities like camping and hiking are declining in a shift away from nature-based recreation. They lay the blame on people spending more time in front of their televisions and computers. I suspect that the decline is based less on indoor recreational activities than the loss of free time and vacations for working families trying to maintain what they have. But that discussion is for another day.

We may be the cultural capital of the world but we also have terrific outdoor things to do. The Appalachian Trail can be gotten to by the Metro-North at Pauling or the Day Line can take you to Bear Mountain. Oceans, rivers and the National Parks surround us. Teach your child to hunt and fish the proper way and they’ll respect nature for the rest of their lives. Spend the night away in a sleeping bag deep in the woods, looking at the stars and you’ll live longer, better. Get out of the theatre, studio or shop and enjoy life. Nobody on their deathbed ever wished they had spent more time at the office.

The Arts? Who Needs Them?

Lindsey Dreyer, over at her My Dance Space has done a favor for lot of us in the theatre community by posting the Presidential Candidates positions on funding for the arts. I've written before about Mike (The Evolutionary Revolutionary) Huckabee and his position on increased arts funding. He sees the arts and arts education as a way to teach children how to communicate ideas in digital society. However he's had a limited impact on the arts in the national scene. The other candidates have had the opportunity to actually vote on the subject. Congress approved a FY 2009 budget request for The National Endowment for the Arts to $160 million. Bush proposed a cut in the budget from the present $144 million to $128 million. Bear in mind that in 1992 the NEA budget was $176 million.

from her blog:

Barack Obama:
-Supports increasing funding for the NEA from $125 million to $175 million annually
-Wants to expand both public and private partnerships between schools and arts organizations
-Supports the creation of an "Artists Corp" to work in low-income communities
-Promotes cultural diplomacy (send performance artists abroad)
-Welcomes international artists into the US
-Wants to provide health care to artists and their family members
-Supports ensuring tax fairness for artists
-As Senator, co-sponsored and passed legislation to honor the legacy of Katherine Dunham
-Supports the Artists-Museum Partnership Act, which allows artists to deduct the fair market value of their work when making charitable contributions

Hillary Clinton:
-Supports the NEA's mission and increasing Federal funding for the NEA
-Wants to reform No Child Left Behind to strengthen funding for arts education in public schools
-Believes in international cultural exchange as a form of diplomacy
-Supporter of Public Broadcasting
-Created the Finger Lakes Trading Cooperative, an initiative that links local businesses with artisans in upstate NY
-Helped to develop affordable living/work space for artists in Buffalo
-Entered a statement to the Senate Congressional Record in support of creative arts therapies
-As First Lady, was the honorary chair of the President's Committee on the Arts and Humanities

John McCain:
-In 1999, voted NO on funding for the National Endowment of the Arts
-Does not support abolishing the NEA
-Voted in favor of the Helms Amendment to withdraw Federal funding grants to art considered "obscene"
-An honorary member of the National Hispanic Foundation for the Arts, 1997-present
-2007, proposed a bill to protect Indian arts and crafts

Marching Backwards Into The Future

Thanks to Theatreforte I've come across a new blog with a terrific idea. Lucas Kretch, a lighting designer here in NYC, posts a weekly round up of news about renewable energy and energy efficiency called Solar Sunday. One link will take you to an article about new solar panels that collects infrared energy and another takes you to an article about an all electric car for short hops thats called the ZENN. Like the feel of that old flashlight you've had forever? Want to keep it forever? Try an LED replacement lamp from LEDtronics that will stretch battery life to 92 hours, 15 to 20 times longer than regular bulb. The lamp will last for 50,000 hours. It's a retirement lamp.

Thanks Lucas. There is so much going on that is often pretty hard to keep up with all the changes. It's good to have it collected in one place. Theatre is such an energy and resource expensive art form. Sets are built an then thrown out. Lighting uses enormous amounts of electricity. As theatre professionals, we should take more control over the use, reuse and efficient use of the resources we have. Producers will complain about the operating costs of running a show but not think twice about having all new wings and platforms built while the show down the street is throwing the same away. I recently heard of a scene shop that threw out a large amount of stock scenery because the cost of the storage space was so high. There is the Set Recycling Hotline that does some terrific work but like many resources in the arts, it is woefully underfunded.

He also has some terrific pieces on art, aesthetics, lighting, theatre and politics.

When Will McCain Lose It?

Finally there's some real red meat in this election. The question won't be black or white, male or female, old politic or new. Thats all the cerebral crap that fills MSNBC airtime and sells commercials on Fox. That's the polite nattering of talking heads. No way you were going to be able to keep peoples interest in this election between now and November. Not over issues like health care, snore. Even the war is being watered down. There needs to be an appeal to the lizard brain. And now we have it.

The question that will hold us on the edge of our seats will not if but when, in what form, where, with whom? Will we see it on Youtube or read about it thirdhand? Will it be this generation's Hunter Thompson vision of Election 2008 or repressed by the best handlers in the business with all the powers of censorship that they control? What am I talking about? When will McCain lose it? When will he go "Jerry Springer"? Will it be a grainy camera phone clip of he and Ann Coulter going nose to adams apple with spittle flying over the value of torture and patriotism? Or McCain storming into Rush Limbaugh's studio and bitch slapping him into submission on the air? Or will be more of a "Macaca" moment, unexpectedly lapsing into country club speak in front of a hidden camera saying what he really thinks of Mexicans. How base will his appeal to the base be? How much grovel is in him before he starts swinging blindly?

This is worth staying tuned for. This is going to be good television. You read it here first.

That's Real White Of You

It’s a pretty sad state of affairs when the one voice of hope in a political campaign is a trial lawyer.

Now that John Edwards is gone, if you're poor, working class, a single parent, live in the wrong area of the country or just can't get a break, as far as this presidential election cycle goes, you're probably SOOL. While speaking kindly of him in tonight's debate, don't expect either of the Dems to really do much for the lower two thirds. The National Journal got some headlines and page views today with a headline that claimed that Obama was the most "liberal" Senator in 2007, ahead of Clinton. But it also noted "Of the 267 measures on which both senators cast votes in 2007, the two differed on only 10."

40% of the population of New Orleans lived in poverty during Bush years. Or rather, most of the Bush years, preflood that is before they drown or had to flee for their lives. But in the 8 years of the Bill Clinton presidency, 40% of the population of New Orleans also lived in poverty. Rhodes scholar, maybe, friend of the working man, I don't think so. That giant sucking sound of jobs heading south still can be heard. There has been less a war on poverty than a war on the poor.

Here are two different web sites that graphically display what is happening in this country.

The first is from a site called Social Explorer . This map displays poverty levels in the US according to the US Census in 2000. Go to the pull down menu on the top right and toggle the 2000 census. Then go to the middle menu and go to the Poverty.

Now compare it to this map from Iraq Coalition Casualty Count.

Where are the fallen heroes coming from? Poor areas in post industrial US. Towns and cities that saw their jobs and industries shipped off to where labor was cheap, laws where easy and profits for multinationals are high. Men and women who would have had good union jobs now see their only way into the middle class is to risk their lives in the military in exchange for an education. It’s called an economic draft. This is not to say that they are not patriotic and don't believe in what they are doing. Their fathers and mothers taught them to believe in the American dream. It is a dream most parents were able to realize by working overtime. That option isn't available for many in places like the small towns of Pennsylvania, West Virginia, upstate New York or any of the other states that comprise the Rust Belt. Those factories are now polluting the Yangtze. The rapidly truncated Appalachians never really shook their poverty despite the efforts in the 60's. There are parts of South Dakota and John McCain's Arizona that skirt third world status.

There will be lip service to the lower two thirds tonight but neither candidates will really be speaking to the working and the poor. They'll be talking to the contributors. Again.
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WWED (What Would Euripides Do?)

I've always been a technology buff. The formative influences in my youth were the polio vaccine, the Mercury Seven, pictures from Mars and deep-sea submarines. I can recall watching open-heart surgery on local television. It was shown late at night so as to avoid disturbing the squeamish but the image of a surgeon holding a beating, human heart in his hand will always stay with me. Good theatre should have a similar gee-whiz factor, either in production, performance or at best, a combination of the two.

While theatrical plotlines remain essentially the same (seven-count em, seven), science, engineering and the audience drive the technological advances in the theatre. Moving lights can produce millions of colors, hydraulics can move tons with ease and high tensile steels and alloys allow for scenery and cables of incredible strength. But the audience doesn't want to see a show about moving lights or scenery or flying people. It still boils down to telling a captivating story. And that human element can still trump technology.

A case in point is automated follow spots. They've been trying for years to find a way to allow an automated moving light to replace a human spot operator. Cheaper and flashier, theoretically you could put twenty spots on a single performer. Its been tried with rock and roll and more recently on a Broadway show. There are two major problems. Lag time and head fakes. Currently a performer carries tracking device that the unit tries to follow. The problem is processing time. Even in milliseconds, the time it takes for a signal to get from performer to processor to the motors is long enough to create a visible lag or jerkiness in the moving head. If you try to preprogram moving head for a point to point cross following an actor, well, unexpected things happen in live theatre. Even the fastest computer processing power will not react faster to a head fake or the suddenly reblocking of a scene than an stagehand who can decide, on the fly, to open the iris and follow the changes as best they can until the regular blocking is restored. Try that with software.

In the first Darpa Grand Challenge in 2004 the furthest an autonomous vehicle got was 7 miles out of the 150-mile course. In the 2007 Urban Challenge, this clip shows how unmanned technology mixed with human traffic . It did pretty well for the most part. For the most part. However imagine being the robot car being a piece of automation and the actors name is Taurus. Ford Taurus. The bugs for follow spots will be worked out.

One potential answer for follow spots may lie in joining facial recognition software in a unit such as High End Systems DL.2 with its built in camera and infrared sensors. By eliminating the need receive a signal from a homing device and introducing the process directly into the software, you may cut down on the lag time. Which could make automated follow spots a reality.

Do I want to hang on to carbon arc follow spots for the sake of job preservation? I would if, with their heat and foul odors, a carbon arc would put fannies in seats. If not, give the people what they want and give me a healthier work environment. Bring on the next deus ex machina. Since the Greeks, it’s always been about spectacle and the story. Why change now?