Praise then darkness, and creation unfinished

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.)

On the strong recommendation of xiphias and cheshyre, I bought tickets for myself and 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.