Showing posts with label Weekly Bulletin. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Weekly Bulletin. Show all posts

Monday, July 6, 2009

(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)


Sunday, June 7, 2009

Weekly Blog Bulletin

[post 016]

And by weekly, I do mean bi-weekly.


So, dear friends, Barack, Michelle and I are in Paris but, man, things are so busy that we don't even get to spend any quality time together. Had to ix-nay the prez on helping out on the trip to Normandy (or as they say in France, Normandie), but at least I got to show him around the Pompidou. Yes, the life of a chief executive is a hectic one, whether you're running a country or a physical comedy blog. Speaking of which, back to work...


______________________________

Quote of the Week

"What you have to do is create a character. Then the character just does his best, and there's your comedy. No begging." -- Buster Keaton

New to the blog?

Check out the intro in the sidebar somewhere to the right... >>>>

This blog is best viewed on Firefox. Please do yourself a favor: get Firefox! (Yes, it's free.)

Still coming soon to a blog with the same URL as this one
Waiting for Godot New York vs. London Ultimate Smackdown with them fightin' supertramps Bill Irwin, Nathan Lane, Patrick Stewart & Ian McKellen, plus Peter Brook goes mano à mano with Beckett in Paris
• Live video report from Déantibulations, the street theatre festival of Antibes, France
• Complete coverage of this summer's Jacques Tati Exposition in Paris

What's New this Week
New posts: The Julians Acrobats, Dick Van Dyke on slapstick, and a Feydeau Performance Report
New sidebars: Blog Post History, My Other Blogs, the Visitor Counter, and Followers.

Keep Showing Me Your Shows!
Still in Europe (Paris at the moment) and will be here and in Turkey thru July 25th and welcome any suggestions of shows to see, especially physical comedy and physical theatre, but other arts events as well. Here’s my remaining schedule:
June 9 – June 12: Amsterdam
June 13- June 17: Berlin & Poznan
June 18–22: SW Turkey
June 22-26: Istanbul
June 27-July 18: Dikili (Turkey) = work
July 19 – July 25: London
July 26: back in New York

So drop me a line if you have any tips for me....

Tech Notes
• I have Comments turned on but for some reason it's giving an error message.
• The blog title field seems empty (no title in your browser tab) because Blogspot has been refusing to let me load my banner instead of the title text. Right now I have a workaround that keeps a minimal title (just a period) and allows me to load the banner.

I hope to get both of these fixed soon, but I've learned the hard way that
technology can make you less creative and less productive, not more, especially if you let it bog you down spending days on end trying to solve some glitch. I'm seduced by technology but at times miss the old days when if you wanted to write, you wrote, if you wanted to do a show you just rehearsed and did it. (Or didn't rehearse.)

I could, for example, have spent another six months figuring out blog coding to get this site to look the way I really want it to look, but I've wisely made a content-first vow and will deal with design/tech issues as I go. For example, I don't like this narrow 2-column Blogger template, but every time I tried something different I ran into glitches that I'd waste a day or two trying to solve, and meanwhile no blog. So eventually this may have a wider three-column layout and a snazzier design, but one thing at a time, eau-quais?



Monday, May 25, 2009

Weekly Blog Bulletin

[post 012]

Quote of the Week

"In the end, everything is a gag." — Charlie Chaplin


New to the blog?

Check out the intro in the sidebar to the right >>>>>>>>>>>

Coming soon to a blog near you (yes, this one):
Waiting for Godot New York vs. London Ultimate Smackdown
with them fightin' supertramps Bill Irwin, Nathan Lane, Patrick Stewart & Ian McKellen
• Live video report from Déantibulations, the street theatre festival of Antibes, France
• Complete coverage of this summer's Jacques Tati Exposition in Paris

Show Me Your Shows!
I'm in Europe & Turkey thru July 25th and welcome any suggestions of shows to see, especially physical comedy and physical theatre, but other arts events as well. Here’s my schedule:
May 21 – May 27: Timisoara
May 28 – June 2: Nice
June 3 – June 8: Paris
June 9 – June 12: Amsterdam
June 13- June 17: Berlin & Poznan
June 18–22: SW Turkey
June 22-26: Istanbul
June 27-July 18: Dikili (Turkey)
July 19 – July 25: London
July 26: back in New York

So drop me a line if you have any tips for me....