Thursday, May 31, 2012

Henry 6.2

Last night we watched Henry VI pt 2 from the BBC Shakespeare series. It was certainly all of a piece stylistically with Henry VI pt 1, and I suppose with the two following plays. The "Nicholas Nickleby" effect is in full force, where prominent actors in one scene show up as mere faces among the crowd in the next. Although many actors did appear in multiple roles throughout the series, one wishes that more of an ensemble approach had been taken in casting the entire project.

Of special note to me was David Pugh in the relatively small role of Peter Thump. Usually when an actor plays a dim-witted character, there remains some small remnant of the actor's persona, just to remind us that he's not actually that slow and simple. Not so with Pugh; he disappeared completely and opaquely in his role, and was a delight every moment he was onscreen.

But what a gruesome play! So many heads rolling about the stage. And Saye's and his son-in-law's fate -- having their severed heads mounted on tall spikes and made to "kiss" -- was a reminder to me that puppetry is, indeed, everywhere.

Saturday, May 19, 2012

My Shrinking Tweet Project

Today I concluded my "shrinking tweet" project, begun on 1/1/12. It was a fun and challenging project to do, and is also (for me at least) an interesting sort-of-journal of the first four and a half months of the year.

Here it is:

1/1
For 2012 I am writing a daily tweet, starting at 140 characters, with each successive tweet shorter by one character. This is the first one.

1/2
This is the second in my series of ever-shortening tweets. Perhaps eventually they won't be so self-referential. Perhaps that's inevitable.

1/3
140 characters is actually plenty to use for expressing yourself. Of course, now I only have 138. I think I'm beginning to hyperventilate.

1/4
So I followed Huffington Post here, but I was so bombarded with tweets that I unfollowed them. It's crucial to keep a balanced tweetflow.

1/5
I'm down to 136 characters in my ever-shortening tweet project. I will end by tweeting one character. The floor is open for nominations.

1/6
I'm down to 135 characters today. I've put my tweets on a diet for New Year's! I wonder what a tweet eats? Just a few bytes, I suppose.

1/7
With each day's tweet being shorter by one character (this one is 134), it's getting harder to pack them with meaningful content. See?

1/8
I've seen "The Muppets" four times now and am intrigued by the copy of Bernstein's "Joy of Music" displayed prominently on the piano.

1/9
Burton loved "The Muppets", and has gone from "Why do you like them so much?" to "Do you think they'll bring back The Muppet Show?".

1/10
It's the second week of 2012! How are all those resolutions going? If you've already broken them, I say just wait for 2013 to come.

1/11
Ten days in on my shrinking tweet project. This one has 130 characters, a savings of ten characters! I pass the savings on to you.

1/12
So I guess I have an unspoken rule not to use text speak in my shrinking tweet project. That would make it too easy. mayb l8r tho

1/13
So one of my tweets is missing. This ever happen to you? My tweet of 1/2/12 doesn't appear on my page. Kind of ruins the effect.

1/14
My shrinking tweet project would be more effective if Twitter showed a character count. I could cheat and you wouldn't know it.

1/15
Two weeks in on my every-day-a-shorter-tweet project. This one is 126 characters. This could get interesting. In a few months.

1/16
Beauty and the Beast 3D is in theaters. But it's been playing at Disney World daily for the past 20 years...and sans glasses!

1/17
If I really wanted to make my tweet-shortening project difficult, I'd do it without the letter "e". Like the novel "Gadsby".

1/18
Dog my cats, us Fotts is lovin' Volume 1 of Fantagraphics' complete Pogo. Walt Kelly were a natural born brown-eyed genius.

1/19
The Belcourt just screened "Being Elmo" and now has scheduled "We Need to Talk About Kevin" and "Clash by Night". Sequels?

1/20
Day 20 of my shrinking tweet project. I start each morning with a bowl of Shrinking Tweets. Part of a balanced breakfast.

1/21
Starting on 1/1 with 140 characters, I have posted a tweet a day, each shorter by 1 character. Why? Because we like you!

1/22
Using hashtags in this shrinking tweet project would be cheating. I could throw one in if I needed an extra #character.

1/23
Every day a shorter tweet. If "brevity is the soul of wit", can't you just feel my tweets getting funnier and funnier?

1/24
Listening to "Pacific Overtures" in great anticipation of Blackbird Theater's Nashville production next month. Yo-ho!

1/25
My shrinking tweet project will finish on 5/19 with my tweeting just 1 character. Should I then work my way back up?

1/26
Our "All the World" and "Scaredy Squirrel" are ALA/ALSC 2012 Notable Children's Videos! Thanks to the Bigfott team!

1/27
Why does "T.G.I. Friday's" have an apostrophe? Like there's some restauranteur named Thomas George Ichabod Friday?

1/28
How many songs about rainbows are there, actually? I can think of six. That's including "The Rainbow Connection".

1/29
Down to 112 characters in my shrinking tweet project. Starting to feel the pinch. I must think smaller thoughts.

1/30
Wow, January almost gone! What's next? Oh yeah, February. Kind of reassuring how that works. Good ol' calendar.

1/31
Burton is now mourning because Lego Universe ended last night. Way to hook kids and then dump them flat, Lego.

2/1
Costco had "Shakespeare in Love" on Blu-ray for $8.99. Impulse buy. How could I possibly not? It's a mystery.

2/2
I suppose the mark of Twitter Fame is when your number of Followers is higher than your number of Following?

2/3
Punxsutawney Phil saw his shadow yesterday. Is that six more weeks of winter, or of what we've been having?

2/4
I wonder if you could sell product placement in your tweets? What an absolutely ridiculous COCA-COLA idea.

2/5
Don't you think that on February 29th, Twitter should let us write 141-character tweets? A man can dream.

2/6
Question: How is the "Pogo" comic strip different from a tweet? Answer: Tweets only have 140 characters.

2/7
It's too bad Coca-Cola never had their own "throwback" product. Would "Diet Coke Throwback" be Tab? Ew.

2/8
I should hire a ghosttweeter to write my tweets for me. Maybe I already have one. Yes...maybe he does.

2/9
I've loved H.R. Pufnstuf ever since I saw "Kaleidoscope" at HemisFair in San Antonio when I was four.

2/10
Starting on 1/1 with 140, each of my daily tweets has been shorter by 1 character. This one has 100!

2/11
At 99, my shrinking tweet character count is now in double digits. Single digits will not be noted!

2/12
Nashville, you have 1 more weekend to see Blackbird Theater's production of Pacific Overtures! Go!

2/13
Burton and I can't go past a display of talking toys without pausing to set them all off at once.

2/14
Happy Valentine's Day to my beautiful wife Laura Jane Bigbee Burton Fott! Our 23rd one together!

2/15
There are 95 characters in this tweet. I got married in '95. A random coincidence? I think not.

2/16
Watched "The Wizard of Oz" on Blu-ray. After seeing Oz, the Scarecrow packs a pistol! How odd.

2/17
Perhaps the Scarecrow's pistol in "The Wizard of Oz" is really a water gun? Watch out, Witch!

2/18
Excited that Ringo Starr is coming to the Ryman on 7/7, his bloody birthday! Peace and love!

2/19
Show idea: Semi-neglected & under-developed corporate mascots. The Bunny Bread Bunny stars.

2/20
This tweet has ninety characters. I'm applying the other fifty toward a novel I'm writing.

2/21
Even as I tweet and enjoy others' tweets, I can't figure out exactly why this is popular.

2/22
What was Twitter like before so many people joined it? "Boring and lonely" I'm guessing.

2/23
I joined Pinterest. I have no idea. Thought it was another name for the "Pinter pause".

2/24
Going out now for Ringo tix, right from the Ryman box office. Take that, Ticketmaster!

2/25
We saw the Oscar-nominated animated shorts, and I think I am rooting for "Wild Life".

2/26
Incredible that the Mac has a 15% market share in the US. I remember the days of 2%!

2/27
Saw "Lost and Found" over the weekend, an excellent animated short from Studio AKA.

2/28
I thought "The Artist" was just dandy. But Best Picture? "The Muppets" was better!

2/29
Today is Leap Day. A magical, Brigadoon-like happening. February with a hangover.

3/1
If we just add 59 seconds to each day, we won't need Leap Day. Much better plan.

3/2
Since 1/1, each of my daily tweets has been 1 character shorter. This 1 has 79.

3/3
Poltergeists make up the principal type of spontaneous material manifestation.

3/4
Following some celebs on Twitter makes you glad you don't actually know them.

3/5
I had one scrambled egg and toast for breakfast. In case you were wondering.

3/6
C'mon! Let's make this the best 3/6/12 EVER! (Sorry, 1912. You're history.)

3/7
I try to avoid politics, but I just can't stay mute any longer: I Go Pogo.

3/8
Good morning world! Sleep well? Any strange dreams? Ooh, that's so weird!

3/9
"The new iPad" is .11 pounds heavier than the iPad 2. That's a negative.

3/10
With "the new iPad", I guess Apple no longer numbers hardware releases?

3/11
This 70-character tweet is exactly half of the maximum length allowed.

3/12
Shrinking tweet project is officially "over the hump". 69 characters!

3/13
A puppy? Yeah, just what we needed! 7 cats, 2 goats, and now 2 dogs.

3/14
Our cats are Indy, Shadow, Dash, Petunia, Sparta, Keypot, and Mary.

3/15
Our goats are Milo and Buddy, and our dogs are Cornelia and Missy.

3/16
The best thing about the "Pufnstuf" movie: The score is terrific!

3/17
At six, I hated that Pufnstuf had a different voice in the film.

3/18
The word "characters" sure does have a lot of characters in it.

3/19
Some tweets can be pointless and without intrinsic merit. See?

3/20
Reading the Steve Jobs bio. On my iPad. Home court advantage.

3/21
Sixty characters/Is just barely sufficient/For writing haiku

3/22
Happy birthday, Stephen Sondheim! (Yeah, Lloyd Webber too.)

3/23
Disney: Release seasons 4 and 5 of The Muppet Show on DVD!

3/24
My tweets are growing shorter daily! As am I, supposedly.

3/25
Looney Tunes at the Belcourt in original 35mm yesterday!

3/26
Following a 55-characters-per-tweet limit. No speeding.

3/27
Don't forget: To legume makes a leg out of you and me.

3/28
My tweet project can be called "constrained writing".

3/29
I'll smell the roses...but do I really have to STOP?

3/30
Dreamed about Meryl Streep. She was terrible in it.

3/31
I am not the very model of a modern Major-General.

4/1
This shrinking tweet project is too hard. I quit.

4/2
Is Hungry Hungry Hippos one of the Hunger Games?

4/3
We have too many pets. By "too many" I mean 11.

4/4
With only 46 characters, what would YOU tweet?

4/5
45 characters. Getting kinda cramped in here.

4/6
All work and no play makes Galen a dull boy.

4/7
Opry Mills's Sweet CeCe's has Junior Mints!

4/8
Nutty Professor in Nashville! Thanks, Mac!

4/9
"41 characters of Twitter on the wall..."

4/10
40 characters! Who needs that other 100?

4/11
It gets harder to say much of anything.

4/12
Nashville Film Festival starting soon!

4/13
This tweet has exactly 37 characters.

4/14
Now aiming my tweets toward "pithy".

4/15
But I'll always settle for "terse".

4/16
Don Hertzfeldt. Belcourt. Tonight.

4/17
Shrinking tweets, now very tight!

4/18
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!

4/19
Meaninglessness has its appeal.

4/20
My Lava Lamp needs a new bulb.

4/21
This tweet has 29 characters.

4/22
antidisestablishmentarianism

4/23
I have a Kermit marionette.

4/24
My tweets are almost gone.

4/25
1 score and 5 characters.

4/26
I am a man of few words.

4/27
This is my daily tweet.

4/28
Beauty is Embarrassing

4/29
Coherency may suffer.

4/30
What more can I say?

5/1
Circling the drain!

5/2
I'm a bit peckish.

5/3
Is this thing on?

5/4
Today is Friday.

5/5
¡Cinco de Mayo!

5/6
14 characters!

5/7
Almost there!

5/8
RIP Maurice.

5/9
Sleep well?

5/10
I am here!

5/11
I'm cool.

5/12
Morning!

5/13
Mom Day

5/14
Tweet!

5/15
I am.

5/16
Yes!

5/17
Hi!

5/18
O!

5/19
1

Thursday, May 17, 2012

Henry I pt 6 (no wait...strike that, reverse it)

Wow, that was different! We watched the BBC Shakespeare's Henry VI pt 1. This is where director Jane Howell was able to have something like a "rep company" to stage Shakespeare's "War of the Roses" tetralogy. (Yeah, I think that word ought to be "quadrilogy" too.)

The set looked like nothing more than Sesame Street, with big, brightly painted, rainbow-colored wooden doors on a sort of children's playground. And the tone was strangely light, even silly, evoking Monty Python much more than did John Cleese in "Taming of the Shrew". It was diverting, certainly, and a very bold choice to treat a "history play" in an almost farcical manner. It felt like it worked pretty well right up until things got really serious with the death of Talbot's son. Trevor Peacock was wonderfully moving as Talbot, but it seemed incongruous to have the scene happening on Sesame Street.

Anyway, the Henry VI plays are hardly ranked among Shakespeare's best, and I'm grateful that Howell (an excellent director for TV) kept things engaging and moving. Actually looking forward to part 2!

Monday, May 7, 2012

In Just No Time At All...

There's been a persistent rumor that Irene Ryan, best known as Granny on "The Beverly Hillbillies", died onstage in the middle of a Broadway performance of "Pippin". This is untrue. From various sources on the Internet, including John Rubinstein (Pippin himself) and Walter Willison (Rubinstein's standby), I've pieced together a timeline of what really happened:

10/17/72 — Ryan turns 70.
10/23/72 — Pippin opens on Broadway.
3/10/73 — Ryan has a stroke onstage during the Saturday matinee, undetected by the audience. She completes this performance, her last, and flies home to Los Angeles for treatment.
3/25/73 — Ryan watches the Tony Awards broadcast from a hospital in Los Angeles. (She was nominated, but lost.)
4/26/73 — Ryan dies.

So she was in "Pippin" on Broadway for less than five months before leaving the show, but lived for almost another seven weeks. Not as dramatic a story as "dying onstage", but it has the virtue of being true!

Sunday, May 6, 2012

A haiku

Child Discipline books
Are always more effective
When bound in hardback

Saturday, May 5, 2012

Merry Wives (and Hilarious Husbands)

We watched "The Merry Wives of Windsor" from the BBC Shakespeare series. If the play is not one of Shakespeare's most accomplished, this was still easily one of the most purely enjoyable productions in the series. Kudos to director David Hugh Jones.

The highlight was Ben Kingsley as Ford. He was completely over the top, and absolutely hilarious in enacting Ford's fits of jealousy and frustration. Amazing that chronologically, this comes immediately after "Gandhi" on his IMDb page. This has to be among the top 10 performances in the entire series.

We also enjoyed Judy Garland (oops, I mean Judy Davis) and Uncle Vernon (oops, I mean Richard Griffiths) as Mistress Ford and Falstaff. And very interesting to see Jonathan Miller's Fringe-mate Alan Bennett, virtually unrecognizable as Shallow.

So David Hugh Jones, a respected but not renowned director, took a below-par Shakespearean play and made a better production of it than Jonathan Miller — an unquestionable genius — did with King Lear. Re my earlier comments about Lear, I just found this quote from PBS producer Jac Venza in Susan Willis's book on the BBC Shakespeare:

The idea of never having a cut in the midst of a long literary speech sounds right, I mean, when Jonathan Miller describes it. The fact is it belies that there is an audience looking at very sophisticated cinematic editing and cutting, so that if anything this will look more strange...Miller took the position that whole scenes should just be performed for the literary style, and there should be no interruption by intercutting...five or six or eight minutes' worth of no alternation. He may be right that at first people listen and don't look as much, but I'm not sure it served the dramatic impact of the pieces as well as it might.

What he said.

Wednesday, May 2, 2012

Beauty is Embarrassing

Saw Beauty is Embarrassing at the Nashville Film Festival a couple of weeks ago. It's a documentary about Wayne White, someone I had vaguely heard of for years but actually knew very little about. The documentary was fantastic, hilarious, and inspirational. And the screening offered a few "extras" that definitely will not be available on the DVD and Blu-ray versions of the film.

I got to meet Wayne White himself, to hang with puppeteer Alison Mork, and perhaps most special of all, to meet Fran Powell. Ms. Powell was the creator and host of numerous Nashville-based music education TV programs that we watched in school when I was growing up in Clarksville, TN. After the screening, I sang the theme to "The Music Box" with her. One wonders...how is is possible that I still remember that song? It has to have been a minimum of 40 years since I heard it, but I remember every note and word.

Wayne and Alison worked on Ms. Powell's show "Mrs. Cabobble's Caboose", which (as a clip in the documentary demonstrated) hugely anticipated the look of "Pee-wee's Playhouse", which both Wayne and Alison also worked on.

I can't recommend the film highly enough.