redbird: Photo of the spiral galaxy Arp 32 (arp 32)
( Dec. 20th, 2011 09:56 pm)
I took [livejournal.com profile] cattitude to the circus this weekend, as a (belated) birthday gift.

The Big Apple Circus is a one-ring circus: mostly clowning and acrobatics, with some small animal acts (both small acts and relatively small animals: no tigers or elephants here, though there were a few horses). They've been going for a few decades now; the first time I went, they were the upstart in a landscape dominated by the three-ring extravaganza of Ringling Bros. Now, they've got a regular spot for their tent at Lincoln Center every late fall/early winter, along with touring. But they still have the one real advantage over Ringling Brothers: you don't spend time worrying, if I look at this cool thing, am I missing something even better in one of the other rings? You can just watch and enjoy.

They do some amusing variations on the traditional stage magician "saw a woman in half" routine, some of it laughing at the "magician" (the clown plays the "magician's assistant" role). Partway through the second act, I was thinking that while I was having fun, there was too high a clowning:acrobatics ratio. Then the trapeze artists came out.

The trapeze work was impressive, and being close is definitely an advantage here. We weren't in the first couple of rows, but the tent is small enough that every seat is close for most purposes (though we might have missed a subtlety or two). The trapeze act ended with each of the acrobats in turn swinging some more, letting go, and landing neatly in the net. Except for the last one, who bounced off the net back up to the trapeze and swung for another arc before letting go again, landing in the net, and stepping down.

Large parts of this year's show are connected by a narrative about a mad scientists' machine that will visualize a person's dreams. (Cattitude's immediate reaction was "I'm thinking of an elephant.")

cut for spoilers )

Definitely a good time. The circus will be in Lincoln Center through January 8; after that, they're doing two weeks in New Jersey in March, then Boston from March 22 through May 13, and Queens from May 22–June 17. Information, tickets, etc. at http://www.bigapplecircus.org/

Note: they use strobes at one point. There are also significant flashing lights in another scene, plus a lot of children in the audience waving toy light sabers and people using cameras with flashes.
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Spokeo is, as far as I can tell, an attempt to aggregate a variety of social networking sites, including Myspace, Xanga, and Flickr, and lots of RSS feeds. Note that LiveJournal isn't one of the choices, though it let me load an RSS feed from someone's LiveJournal, and showed me their default userpic when I'd done so.

It describes itself as being part of Web2.0; I hope the lack of any sort of FAQs or how-tos isn't typical of Web 2.0. Looking at the "featured users" page got me a perfectly nice BBC News RSS feed, which would probably be more appealing if I didn't have the BC headlines as one of the clickable choices at the top of Firefox.

There seems to be a lot of content in what's either Chinese or Japanese; someone who can read those languages might have more fun here. At the moment, though, it looks like a solution in search of a problem: I don't want to read all my Web stuff on one site, and a lot of why people use things like LJ and MySpace is to have some control over who can see their content.

(If you want to check it out, they're at www.spokeo.com, and will ask for an email address to register.)
Tags:
Spokeo is, as far as I can tell, an attempt to aggregate a variety of social networking sites, including Myspace, Xanga, and Flickr, and lots of RSS feeds. Note that LiveJournal isn't one of the choices, though it let me load an RSS feed from someone's LiveJournal, and showed me their default userpic when I'd done so.

It describes itself as being part of Web2.0; I hope the lack of any sort of FAQs or how-tos isn't typical of Web 2.0. Looking at the "featured users" page got me a perfectly nice BBC News RSS feed, which would probably be more appealing if I didn't have the BC headlines as one of the clickable choices at the top of Firefox.

There seems to be a lot of content in what's either Chinese or Japanese; someone who can read those languages might have more fun here. At the moment, though, it looks like a solution in search of a problem: I don't want to read all my Web stuff on one site, and a lot of why people use things like LJ and MySpace is to have some control over who can see their content.

(If you want to check it out, they're at www.spokeo.com, and will ask for an email address to register.)
Tags:
On the strong recommendation of [livejournal.com profile] xiphias and [livejournal.com profile] cheshyre, I bought tickets for myself and [livejournal.com profile] cattitude for the Actors' Shakespeare Company production of King Lear, transferred from Boston to La Mama E.T.C. It's a theatre-in-the-round (well, rectangle) production, and takes the approach to Shakespeare that I tend to like, namely very minimal scenery. I do wish the actors, particularly those playing Lear and Cordelia, had enunciated better.

The company used the space well: not only were entrances and exits frequently up and down stairs, but some of the action was on the stairs between the seats. In particular, at the beginning, when Edmund is told to step back, he simply sat down on the stair, about six feet from us. By the time everyone else had exited and he spoke, I'd forgotten he was there.

I not only hadn't seen Lear live before [1], but if I ever saw a filmed production, it was a long time ago, and I didn't remember details. More precisely, the details I remembered were the lines everyone quotes, not turns of the plot.

The emotional shape of the play is odd; the first half is a lot closer to comedy than Macbeth or Hamlet. It's not just that the Fool, as Cattitude pointed out, has the best lines, it's that everyone has comic lines. Then there's a storm, and everyone and everything turns a lot darker. By the end, I was thinking "if he [Edmund] survives the battle, we're in trouble." He does, of course.

A good production, if not quite as good as my Boston reviewers led me to expect, but I don't know if that was me or the play; transfers are always potentially iffy, and 3.5 hours is a long time to sit in a metal folding chair even with a fifteen-minute intermission during which I found space to do most of my shoulder and heel stretches.

I think I want to track down a good filmed Lear and put it in our Netflix queue, for a few weeks from now. Good defined for these purposes as minimal cuts, good acting, and clear speech. Period/costuming aren't important, and while I know there's no film equivalent of a bare stage, the focus should be on the language, not the landscape or the storm effects. Recommendations, please.

[1] Lots of Hamlets, multiple Macbeths, Tempests, and A Midsummer Night's Dreams, some very good variations on Romeo and Juliet, from West Side Story to Shakespeare's R and J, a four-man production set in a boys' boarding school, an assortment of histories and comedies, even Cymbeline, courtesy of the completists at the Public Theatre. Some of that is fashion: The Tempest was very popular about ten years ago. And some is probably chance.
On the strong recommendation of [livejournal.com profile] xiphias and [livejournal.com profile] cheshyre, I bought tickets for myself and [livejournal.com profile] cattitude for the Actors' Shakespeare Company production of King Lear, transferred from Boston to La Mama E.T.C. It's a theatre-in-the-round (well, rectangle) production, and takes the approach to Shakespeare that I tend to like, namely very minimal scenery. I do wish the actors, particularly those playing Lear and Cordelia, had enunciated better.

The company used the space well: not only were entrances and exits frequently up and down stairs, but some of the action was on the stairs between the seats. In particular, at the beginning, when Edmund is told to step back, he simply sat down on the stair, about six feet from us. By the time everyone else had exited and he spoke, I'd forgotten he was there.

I not only hadn't seen Lear live before [1], but if I ever saw a filmed production, it was a long time ago, and I didn't remember details. More precisely, the details I remembered were the lines everyone quotes, not turns of the plot.

The emotional shape of the play is odd; the first half is a lot closer to comedy than Macbeth or Hamlet. It's not just that the Fool, as Cattitude pointed out, has the best lines, it's that everyone has comic lines. Then there's a storm, and everyone and everything turns a lot darker. By the end, I was thinking "if he [Edmund] survives the battle, we're in trouble." He does, of course.

A good production, if not quite as good as my Boston reviewers led me to expect, but I don't know if that was me or the play; transfers are always potentially iffy, and 3.5 hours is a long time to sit in a metal folding chair even with a fifteen-minute intermission during which I found space to do most of my shoulder and heel stretches.

I think I want to track down a good filmed Lear and put it in our Netflix queue, for a few weeks from now. Good defined for these purposes as minimal cuts, good acting, and clear speech. Period/costuming aren't important, and while I know there's no film equivalent of a bare stage, the focus should be on the language, not the landscape or the storm effects. Recommendations, please.

[1] Lots of Hamlets, multiple Macbeths, Tempests, and A Midsummer Night's Dreams, some very good variations on Romeo and Juliet, from West Side Story to Shakespeare's R and J, a four-man production set in a boys' boarding school, an assortment of histories and comedies, even Cymbeline, courtesy of the completists at the Public Theatre. Some of that is fashion: The Tempest was very popular about ten years ago. And some is probably chance.
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