The $400.00USD Amazon Kindle eReader sold out in less than five hours on its debut day November 20th. The next batch sold out even quicker — I was lucky to get one delivered Friday — and the third batch of Kindles will not be available for purchase until after December 25th.
One of my best friends and mentor was the late, great, Marshall Jamison and he, above anyone else, taught me many of my most important life lessons — the first of which was the definition of a “bastard.”
Blogging is the new Theatre.
We are now our own producing companies and we create — in real time — new tragedies, musicals and comedies every single day online.
Bertolt Brecht was a SuperGenius author, writer and director.
As a radical man of the German theater in the 1920’s, 1930’s and 1940’s his influence and style provide us great vision today.
Continue reading → Bertolt Brecht and the Meaning of White Light
I have never been a big Sopranos fan. The acting on the show has been generally pretty good, but I never drank from the Sopranos well of dedicated fanaticism and I missed the first few years of the show when they originally aired.
I am now caught up on all the episodes and — after watching last night’s dreadful “Final Episode” — I am left, once again, wondering what all the fuss was about over a mediocre show.
When I was but a wee lad at Columbia University in the City of New York as a freshly married, newly-out-of-college, first year graduate student studying theatre — I was pleased when a “Big Name” agent from a “Bigger Name” international talent agency came to one of the plays I wrote and wanted to “take a meeting” with me about representation. You live for moments like that in the hard life of the theatre.
Laughter is a great salve against the pain within and threats from the outside in — but laughter can be hard to effectively communicate in a text form — so, to assist you in the release of antigens against the toxins, I have created: The Universal Guide for Textual Laughing.
Whether you realize it or not, your schooling brands you — fairly or not — with its historic reputation in the perception of the mainstream, middling, public mind.
Continue reading → School Branding: From Football U. to Ivy League
I have always been of the mind that all speech should be free. One should always feel free to express the worst in us, out loud, in public, where the speech can be tested against community standards and either be excoriated or accepted.
There are two events, recently published in The New York Times, that force me to wonder if there is a reason why some expressions should never be made public.
The first example concerns the murder trial of Ronell Wilson — who allegedly shot two undercover detectives in the back of the head — when he was arrested, handwritten scraps of a Rap song were found in his pocket describing the killings before they happened.
HIV and AIDS are infections that still plague the face of the earth even though there are drug treatment therapies that can buy time for those infected.
Without medical intervention and treatment the average incubation period for HIV is 9-10 years and death after a full-blown AIDS diagnosis is still only 9.2 months.
People and their deaths are not best understood on timelines and statistical averages. The value in the human component of living is in remembering those who have suffered and fallen before you.
To live is to remember.
I remember in the mid-to-late 1980’s how this unnamed “Gay disease” we now know as HIV/AIDS was eating people alive. It was a frightening time because no one really knew in a shared, universal societal understanding, how HIV was being transmitted or how AIDS was being contracted.
There were rumors in the mainstream community you could get AIDS — no one really understood the HIV component until years later — by sitting on a toilet seat or by someone sneezing on you or by just shaking hands with an infected person.
Continue reading → To Live is to Remember: A Brief History of AIDS
You must be logged in to post a comment.