And I am left with:
1. A place to live! Next year moving in with a girl and her brother from up near Loch Ness in a beautiful and absurdly affordable flat (landlords had a kid go here and were horrified at the increasing-by-£5/month-every-year prices). Spoke to the sister (Louise) two days ago, and played a game of pool and chatted with her brother Archie today. Both cool, fourth years next year, a psychologist and neurologist.
2. An artist-in-residence for my production company, who will be costume/set/poster designer for Hecuba and puppet maker for Nightmare Before Christmas next year! Harry (my co-director in Psychosis) has this brilliant idea of attaching people to a production company rather than a specific show, and of having an artist-in-residence who can consult and implement on all things arty, so he is 100% responsible for the idea. Talked about doing Hecula almost cyberpunk, with lots of wires and circuitry on costumes. Also an interesting thought of playing with language--Ancient Greek, binary, html (Korean? Hmm not sure how it fits...). So.
3. Actors for Hecuba--aka finally had a serious chat with Clare and talked more with Cheolseung about the show and they are both in, so that's good.
4. A producer, one of my 1984 freshers, who I think will be brilliant. Meeting with him tomorrow.
5. Saw various people before they left for home/travels. Lots of coffee/tea.
I think that's a decent list.
Saturday, January 24, 2009
Friday, January 23, 2009
More things I am grateful for: a 1:1.373 pound-to-dollar conversion rate
Looked at some old posts and in one of them from the beginning of the year I was excited about it being 1:1.83. Hah!
Talked to Clare in LA on iChat today and am really excited that I think the online show (Hecuba) will get off the ground. Talking to a girl who I'm hoping to rope in to be the company artist (costumer for Hecuba?) tomorrow and our producer on Sunday. Planned out the first couple days of Psychosis with Harry yesterday, as well as "interviewed" for a flat (had a chat with the girl who is there and planning to stay). Awesome place, very cheap--talking to her brother tomorrow, who is also living there next year, and am hopeful. Also played an awesome (in that it was 6 hours long) game of Lord of the Rings Risk yesterday, and won! So that's my accomplishment of the week. Have started a game of chess downstairs with Sammy where we leave the chessboard out and make a move whenever we pass.
Have decided I really must start reading. Fallout 3 is great, but that's no excuse.
Talked to Clare in LA on iChat today and am really excited that I think the online show (Hecuba) will get off the ground. Talking to a girl who I'm hoping to rope in to be the company artist (costumer for Hecuba?) tomorrow and our producer on Sunday. Planned out the first couple days of Psychosis with Harry yesterday, as well as "interviewed" for a flat (had a chat with the girl who is there and planning to stay). Awesome place, very cheap--talking to her brother tomorrow, who is also living there next year, and am hopeful. Also played an awesome (in that it was 6 hours long) game of Lord of the Rings Risk yesterday, and won! So that's my accomplishment of the week. Have started a game of chess downstairs with Sammy where we leave the chessboard out and make a move whenever we pass.
Have decided I really must start reading. Fallout 3 is great, but that's no excuse.
Thursday, January 22, 2009
The quiet days
Intellectually, at least. Have been out with friends/at parties/social almost every night, with days spent watching films and playing Fallout 3, as predicted. Have begun to look at the Hecuba script, and still need to re-read Psychosis and memorize my lines for Titus (again, *not* doing theatre here). Have a stack of books including Day of the Triffids, The Windup Bird Chronicles, T.E. Lawrence's memoir, and a sociology of violence. Stack of films, most notably including the including the original Godzilla. Also, today in perhaps an hour or so I'll head over to a friends for what I suspect will be a rest-of-the-day-long game of Lord of the Rings Risk. Intersemester break is hardcore nerd time.
Been consuming a lot more than thinking, but have been thinking a bit about narrative and the difference between "good" and "engaging", if there is one. There is a wall between pop culture and "art" in my mind, but I'm not sure whether I really believe that it belongs there. The film I've enjoyed the most lately was Robert Rodriguez's Planet Terror, a loving sendup of bad zombie films, featuring fake scratches and a missing reel, bad dialogue, unsubtle foreshadowing, a stripper with a machine gun/grenade launcher for a leg and helicopter decapitation of zombies. And done with such knowledge of its own ridiculousness that it was just thoroughly liberating and enjoyable.
Been consuming a lot more than thinking, but have been thinking a bit about narrative and the difference between "good" and "engaging", if there is one. There is a wall between pop culture and "art" in my mind, but I'm not sure whether I really believe that it belongs there. The film I've enjoyed the most lately was Robert Rodriguez's Planet Terror, a loving sendup of bad zombie films, featuring fake scratches and a missing reel, bad dialogue, unsubtle foreshadowing, a stripper with a machine gun/grenade launcher for a leg and helicopter decapitation of zombies. And done with such knowledge of its own ridiculousness that it was just thoroughly liberating and enjoyable.
Saturday, January 17, 2009
Exams: Over
Didn't go badly...better than I expected, to be honest, as questions succeeded in being vague and manipulate-able. Unless I've done really poorly or exceptionally well I'll have a 2:1 in both subjects (as I'm on the mid-upper end-but not on the borderline-of both from continuous assessment). I realize I get a bit silly with exams: in philosophy I talked about sceptics going around walking into walls (because they'd doubt they were there) and the SD question about climate managed to look like an instruction manual with the number of little diagrams I'd drawn, complete with before and after shots (what can I say, I had a full hour per question).
And now? Drinking and Fallout 3 in the short term. And starting to organize shows this year, co-directing Psychosis in the break, e-mailing professors and seeing if I can do a joint honours. Let the scheming commence!
And now? Drinking and Fallout 3 in the short term. And starting to organize shows this year, co-directing Psychosis in the break, e-mailing professors and seeing if I can do a joint honours. Let the scheming commence!
Wednesday, January 14, 2009
Markets in everything
Link stolen directly from MarginalRevolution, but left me speechless (and blog-ful).
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/7818140.stm
I watched an episode of Pushing Daisies last night that featured a company whose product was "friends for hire", and thought "well isn't that just cute and quirky". Turns out, it's also true! The article is about the many things you can rent hourly in Japan, including pets and fathers. It makes a lot of sense in a very creepy way...it makes me imagine a dystopian future where specialization has gone so far that everyone has a single niche role that they fulfill and nothing else, so that "programmer" and "husband" are incompatible. How does this interact with suffragist movements and the current obsession with user-generated content? Are specialization and universalism (or whatever term you want to use) incompatible? How can the future accommodate both?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/7818140.stm
I watched an episode of Pushing Daisies last night that featured a company whose product was "friends for hire", and thought "well isn't that just cute and quirky". Turns out, it's also true! The article is about the many things you can rent hourly in Japan, including pets and fathers. It makes a lot of sense in a very creepy way...it makes me imagine a dystopian future where specialization has gone so far that everyone has a single niche role that they fulfill and nothing else, so that "programmer" and "husband" are incompatible. How does this interact with suffragist movements and the current obsession with user-generated content? Are specialization and universalism (or whatever term you want to use) incompatible? How can the future accommodate both?
Monday, January 12, 2009
Smooth travel
William, lying in my comfortable chair watching Kite Runner (recommended, though main guy as an adult is terrible) and eating warm nuts in your leather jacket, I realize that I am simply an extension of you, like some sort of detachable appendage. :)
The trip home was incredibly smooth and problem free, though the bus I got on for St Andrews decided to take the scenic night tour of what I swear must be ALL of Fife, every small town bus stop, for three hours before finally getting here. But no matter. Have seen Jim and Sammy but nobody else so far...still, it's good to be back. Feels like I just picked up where I left off--studying decently and thinking more about drama this semester. I've really got a lot going on, and I want to start really focusing on academics, as next year starts counting. It's cold but not awful, and I feel good, like I've hit the ground running.
This winter break was interesting, very range-y in scope. I feel like the two recurring themes were friendship--how it changes, what it requires, and the importance of loyalty--and teaching, as I'm far enough from High School that I think I'm really listening when my old teachers talk! Education is fascinating, and while I'm still not that keen on teaching, it's really got me thinking about the fundamentals of how schools are organized, from subject areas to periods for classes. For me, elementary school had a single teacher for everything, Chile had different teachers for subjects but kept classes of kids together, middle school had block scheduling with 2 hour periods of each class every other day, and high school had an hour of each each day. Thinking about it, I'm intrigued by the Chilean concept--though it made it very difficult to integrate as an outsider, I'm sure it prevented what I felt in High School and especially here: that I don't know many of the people in my classes outside of that context, so that each class is a very solitary experience. Though from my visit to UCI it seems that the core classes at US institutions can help solve this issue, leading me to think that the "breadth" classes at universities are more for social than academic growth.
Have also talked with quite a few people about our experiences in college, as we have been here long enough to have real opinions (maybe). There was a common feeling of disappointment, oddly. As if there had been this huge buildup from High School and our parents' experiences, and the actualization was not bad, just...less. People were less engaged than we thought they'd be, academics were more rigorous but at the same time more distant (for larger institutions), social interaction by-and-large good but overshadowed by the Academy, and overall opportunities not as abundant or important as we thought they'd be. Will we revise history as we get older to see this as the best time of our lives, or are we really having a different experience than our parents?
Also, a UK/US thought differential: in the US, university students are seen as having it together, hard-working, intellectually engaged, and maybe a bit dirty or party-ish. In the UK (and probably especially St Andrews), "students" is almost a derogatory term, as they are seen as having too much time on their hands and generally interacting with locals in a drunken and destructive way. I suspect the reasons for this are an earlier drinking age coupled with the fact that most people here have gone to university, so it is not looked at as a elite class indicator but rather as a shared experience that most people have gone through (so that students see it more as a right than a privilege (being free or heavily subsidized helps) and it attracts more types of people).
The trip home was incredibly smooth and problem free, though the bus I got on for St Andrews decided to take the scenic night tour of what I swear must be ALL of Fife, every small town bus stop, for three hours before finally getting here. But no matter. Have seen Jim and Sammy but nobody else so far...still, it's good to be back. Feels like I just picked up where I left off--studying decently and thinking more about drama this semester. I've really got a lot going on, and I want to start really focusing on academics, as next year starts counting. It's cold but not awful, and I feel good, like I've hit the ground running.
This winter break was interesting, very range-y in scope. I feel like the two recurring themes were friendship--how it changes, what it requires, and the importance of loyalty--and teaching, as I'm far enough from High School that I think I'm really listening when my old teachers talk! Education is fascinating, and while I'm still not that keen on teaching, it's really got me thinking about the fundamentals of how schools are organized, from subject areas to periods for classes. For me, elementary school had a single teacher for everything, Chile had different teachers for subjects but kept classes of kids together, middle school had block scheduling with 2 hour periods of each class every other day, and high school had an hour of each each day. Thinking about it, I'm intrigued by the Chilean concept--though it made it very difficult to integrate as an outsider, I'm sure it prevented what I felt in High School and especially here: that I don't know many of the people in my classes outside of that context, so that each class is a very solitary experience. Though from my visit to UCI it seems that the core classes at US institutions can help solve this issue, leading me to think that the "breadth" classes at universities are more for social than academic growth.
Have also talked with quite a few people about our experiences in college, as we have been here long enough to have real opinions (maybe). There was a common feeling of disappointment, oddly. As if there had been this huge buildup from High School and our parents' experiences, and the actualization was not bad, just...less. People were less engaged than we thought they'd be, academics were more rigorous but at the same time more distant (for larger institutions), social interaction by-and-large good but overshadowed by the Academy, and overall opportunities not as abundant or important as we thought they'd be. Will we revise history as we get older to see this as the best time of our lives, or are we really having a different experience than our parents?
Also, a UK/US thought differential: in the US, university students are seen as having it together, hard-working, intellectually engaged, and maybe a bit dirty or party-ish. In the UK (and probably especially St Andrews), "students" is almost a derogatory term, as they are seen as having too much time on their hands and generally interacting with locals in a drunken and destructive way. I suspect the reasons for this are an earlier drinking age coupled with the fact that most people here have gone to university, so it is not looked at as a elite class indicator but rather as a shared experience that most people have gone through (so that students see it more as a right than a privilege (being free or heavily subsidized helps) and it attracts more types of people).
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