(Forced) Blog Vacation

[post 019]

Talk about technical difficulties!

Traveling across eight countries in a matter of a month or so allowed me to see a whole lot of bloggable performance, but left me very little time to edit video or to write. The result was only one post, though a substantial one: my recent report on the Antibes Street Theatre festival. I thought I'd catch up now that I'm in one place here in Dikili, Turkey, where all I'm doing is saving you, your grandchildren, and planet Earth from extinction and all that other messy stuff. In other words, teaching a lot and learning even more at the Climate Advocacy Institute, where I'm heading a Bloomfield College Creative Arts & Technology team working in collaboration with OSI (the Open Society Institute), Tactical Tech Collective, 350.org, and IndyAct training activists to prepare for COP 15, the United Nations Climate Change Conference this December in Copenhagen.


All fine and good, but disaster has struck, at least in terms of this blog. For starters, internet service here has been spotty at best, at times non-existent. To make matters worse, YouTube is blocked in Turkey and the proxy servers (vtunnel; hidemyass; etc.) aren't doing the trick this year. Yes, it's hard to do this kind of blog without YouTube! All of which I might be able to work around, but right after finishing the Antibes post my lovely Mac laptop died, dead as a doornail. In NYC I live five blocks from an Apple Store; here I'm five countries away. This means I am suffering the ultimate indignity of having to type on a Windows computer, and with a Turkish keyboard no less. But the really sad news is that my Mac had a ton of performance video and half-written blog posts on it, which may indeed be lost forever, but I won't know for sure until I reach London or New York. Yeah, yeah, I know I should have backed it up, but I wanted to travel light for a change and not lug a firewire drive around for ten weeks.

So the blog will be back at full delta force, maybe not The Day After Tomorrow, but certainly by the last week of July; meanwhile, if you have any London physical comedy recommendations for me for the week of July 20th, drop me a line!

Update: Back in NYC, and yes it was total hard drive failure, lost some good stuff but did have some things backed up. Hope to have computer back by end of the week and start posting soon thereafter. — jt (7-30)