I remember when I had time to blog

oy. oy. oy.

So my life has been just a shade of nuts recently. The play is going like gang busters (we’re less than four weeks away from curtain… of course that would be if we had a curtain). Long Ago and Far Away is in good shape. Ok… better shape, everyone’s just about off book. Ancient History needs a lot more work. But I trust my actors. So I’m not uber concerned yet. I just want this to be a good show. A cut above standard area community theatre (no crack on those theatres, it’s just this is the goal we set for ourselves). Something that I feel good about putting infront of an audience. Now, if I could only just find a gun! More on that tomorrow.

The play and some other projects are just eating up my life right now and providing a lot of drama. Speaking of drama, some is going on on top of Kodak tower. A male falcon has finally arrived to mate with our female falcon. But, surprise… he ain’t the usual male. The lack of banding on his legs shows that the new boy in town is a wild falcon, not Cabot-Sirocco who has “ruled” the nest since the birds first started nesting. This would indicate that Cabot has left the area (or left the earth). It’s possible that our Mr X knocked off Cabot (as falcons are known to do) and took his mate. You can follow As The Falcon Flys here.

In other news, Martial Arts continues to go well. I had a good class last night. Basically I threw everything and the kitchen sink while sparring. I’m spinning more regularly now (which is good), but my stance work still sucks (which is bad). As Sifu put’s it, I’m chopping away at a brick wall that is hindering my forward progress. Last night I was knocking bigger peices out of it. Soon I should be able to see to the other side. And when that day comes I’ll be able to open up a whole new can of whoop ass!

bits & pieces

I don’t have much time to blog, but I thought I’d sneak a quick note. I’ve added ronincyberpunk to my list of blogs of note. Other than being named after a masterless samurai, being a fellow Eagle Scout, and working in a theme park, Ronin keeps a pretty interesting blog. Check it out.

If I have time tonight I’ll put up a new MP3, survey and some more quotes. But the way things are going that might not occur until tomorrow.

follow up on the post on God and Creativity

heather posted the following comment after my God and Creativity post:

So… would those with more creative types of minds be closer to “God”? Some people out there just aren’t creative… are they less divine?

Interesting point, but I’d have to disagree with the notion that some people are not creative. I’ve yet to find someone who isn’t creative in some aspect of their lives. Or rather who doesn’t have the potential to be creative. Creativity is a very broad experience. Last night was a great example. An old martial arts friend is leaving town and so as part of saying goodbye, we had a huge open class/sparring night. Most of the people there were not necessarily what you would consider creative. Or at least in the traditional artistic sense. However once each of them started moving and fighting there were flashes of brilliance and creativity that were inspiring. Those moments were not that much different from Artie Shaw’s moments of brilliant creativity on the clarinet (though I don’t want to suggest that we were on a common level when it came to mastery of our chosen instruments). This also relates back to the theory of Optimal Experience that Csikszentmihalyi puts forth in books like Flow: moments when you are in a state of flow/rhythm/balance internally and with your surroundings. I can’t think of a better description of a pseudo divine state than that.

Of course, if a person chooses not to embrace their creative aspects then they are potentially cutting themselves off from this type of experience. And there are people, who for reasons I can’t understand, do choose to do that.

in other news

– I finally got a flying scissors take down off yesterday. Thanks to Aaron for being such a great sparring partner! Now if I could have gotten the roll-over-the-other-person’s-back-sacrifice-throw I tried I would have been ready for my career as a low budget action star.

– Theater: Uggg… just found out that our set designer will not be able to oversee the set construction. Crap! I don’t have time to find someone else. I knew things were going too well there.

busy, busy

This isn’t going to be a proper update ’cause life is way to crazy right now. Things have blown up (in good ways) with exact theatre company. To your left is the first draft of our poster for our first production. It needs a lot of work: it’s too dark, too busy, and the titles won’t be in Courier. But it’s a start (I did most of the work on it last night). The final will be done before the end of the week. We also just received work today that the Rochester Arts Council will act as our financial sponsor. While this isn’t direct financial support, this is the best news we could get at this point. Thanks to this we are now a non-profit organization under their umbrella. So we can finally start to begin our development work. Up until this point we were holding off because we wanted to ensure that any donations people made would be tax deductible! Phew!

Other bits and peices:

– if you want to check out that Star Wars trailer I talked about yesterday you need to copy and paste the following URL:

http://starwars.apple.com/ep2/clone_war/media/gate/ep2_clone_war_p640.mov

apparently the site doesn’t like direct links to the trailer… I dunno. Thanks Di for spottin that.

– Another good martial arts class last night. Now if I could just remember to do scissors takedowns when I manage to get myself in to the right position. It’s unusually a case of two moves later I suddenly think “Hey… I couldda done something cool back there…” And as we all know martial arts are really about being able to do cool things.

– After a lot of requests, here’s a bigger picture of the new hair. I’ve also linked the picture in the post below to this one. If you still want a bigger picture… tough. You’ll have to see it in person.

– Hopefully I’ll have more time to write tomorrow (including a follow up on the creativity posting & saying hi to some cool people linking to my site [you know who you are… hi!]).

space opera

Did you catch the Star Wars trailer last night? I wasn’t planning to watch but I ended up needing to vedge for a bit and turned on the TV just in time. Ummm…. Yeah…. It was cool, I guess. I really don’t think Lucas’s strength has ever been direction. Of the first three films he only directed the first (believe it or not, David Lynch was a candidate to direct Jedi). Phantom Menace only strengthen that view. I just don’t like the way he frames shots. I was also underwhelmed by the amount of CG in the trailer (yeah I know it’s a Star Wars film… ). So I was interested but not overly excited by what I saw last night. Of course I’m going to go see it eventually (ok… I’ll be in line the first night next to my friend Aaron) but I’m not expecting very much. In the mean time I’m still trying to track down and watch the movies that inspired Lucas (like The Searchers and The Hidden Fortress).

a brief meditation on the nature of God and Creativity

some thoughts and ideas, often gleamed in the most unusual of circumstances, stick with you your entire life. I was reminded of one of those on Friday morning as I drove into work listening to NPR. Something said in an an interview with Artie Shaw, played on Morning Edition, struck a chord within me. Shaw was a revolutionary figure on the Jazz clarinetist and band leader. He left performing behind years ago because his quest for perfection was driving him mad. At the end of the interview he said the following when asked about a clarinet in his home:

“That’s the clarinet I used to use… but it’s just a piece of wood, you know, with holes in it and they put these clumsy keys on it and you’re supposed to try to take that and manipulate it with throat muscles and chops… and try to make something happen that never happened before. And when you do, you never forget it. It beats sex, it beats anything… when you hit something on the clarinet, or any instrument, and you know that’s absolutely as close to perfect as you can make it… if you were God, you’d come closer. Very rarely can you say that.”

The reference to creation and God reminded me of something that I had heard a few years ago which at the time I thought it was an interesting idea. The more and more I thought about it and Shaw’s comment, I knew that I wanted to blog and share it. Craig Yoe, co founder of Yoe! Studios threw out this idea at a conference. Craig is one for the most interesting folks I think I’ve met. Eccentric is putting it mildly when it comes to Craig. At the workshop, he explained that he’s an ordained pastor and shared the following:

“If you look at the bible, the first words of Genesis, the first action God took was to create: ‘In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth’ (Genesis: 1,1). We, you and I, are the closest God, and perhaps the closest to being divine, when we create.”

The more that I think about those words, the more that I find that I agree with them. Whether while creating something myself, or more often experiencing the creations of others I feel connected to something far greater than just us. Call it what you like (feel free to mold this to your personal spiritual views), but there is something very mystical in the act of bringing something new and unique into the world. It transcends all other activites. And perhaps it does put us just a little closer to the devine. At least I’d like to think so.