Really Unfortunate Acronym of the Day
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Moan of the Day
Oh man, I cannot wait until we evolve into a species capable of focusing together on an important issue for five minutes without being distracted by squirrels and shiny things.
Weekend Update
Finally finished the first full draft of Act I of The Manga Flute over the weekend. Much last-minute trimming. When I’d assembled all the individual scenes and got them formatted and then read through the whole thing, three of the dialogue scenes seemed too long. This isn’t uncommon; I’ve found it’s better not to bother trying very hard to trim a scene to its best length until I’ve got enough of the story written to get a sense of what the overall pacing and rhythm is like, as what happens in every scene can change how the pacing feels in all the following scenes.
Even so, I was startled at how really overlong the early scene between Tamino and Papageno (after Papageno’s entrance song and before Tamino’s portrait song) was. I managed to trim it by a full third, and it may need a little more. There’s a lot of ground to cover in that scene, though. It would be lovely if I could knock on Mr. Mozart’s grave and ask him for some music for a light, comic, back-and-forth duet for Tamino and Papageno that I could use to highlight the differences between them and that I could place right in the middle of that scene to break up the stretch of spoken dialogue. But I can’t. So I need to keep the scene as brisk and short as I can make it without losing its fun.
The title of the piece is now back to The Manga Flute. I had meant that as a working title, not a serious suggestion about what to call the finished production. It seems kind of silly and self-referential to me. But I have been told by several people that the title is getting a lot of positive reactions and stirring up a lot of interest, so I’ve been persuaded to let it be the final title. Part of collaborating with others is always picking the right battles to lose, and it’s a wonderful thing to have a title that makes people think, hey, that sounds like the sort of thing that I want to see, so I’m keeping my fingers crossed that this was the right battle to concede without much of a fight. The title that I had decided on was Tamino’s Magic Flute, because — to my ear, anyway — it sounds like what the title could have been if the story really had started out as a manga or anime. But if The Manga Flute makes more people think that this sounds like a fun show that’ll be good to bring the whole family to, then it’s a better title. I hope so, anyway.
Two Things I Am Hating About iOS5
First, they somehow screwed up the shuffle function. I have an iTunes smart playlist on my laptop that gives me a list of randomly selected “albums” (for classical music, I group each work as an “album” and make the individual movements “songs”). I shuffle by albums, and this way I get random works but the movements within each work stay together and in the right order. Since updating to iOS5, however, when I sync to my iPhone, this list gets shuffled again — by song, dammit. The playlist is still fine on my laptop, but on my iPhone the list begins with the fourth movement of Verklärte Nacht, the second variation from the Enigma Variations, the first movement of Dvořák’s Sixth Symphony, the sixth movement from J. S. Bach’s Overture No. 1 in C, the second movement from Schubert’s “Unfinished” Symphony, and so on. This is not how I want a shuffled list to work! And I cannot figure out how to get my iPhone to go back to just duplicating the playlist on my laptop like it used to. Maybe there’s a setting somewhere I need to set, but I’ve looked around and can’t find one.
Second, the iPhone, or at least the music part of it, now seems to ignore all characters other than letters and numbers in alphabetizing lists. For something like 20 years, I have used a bullet (option-8 on the Mac keyboard) at the start of the name to pull my most important or frequently accessed files to the top of a list, so I don’t have to be scrolling for them all the time. This no longer works — the item with the bullet is alphabetized as though the bullet were not there. Arrgh! I’ve tried several other symbols and they all work like that now. Again, things are fine on my laptop, but screwed up in the Music app on my iPhone. Why did they change this? It’s going to take a mess of trouble to find something else that works (I may have to resort to “aa” if this is now true of all symbols, and “aa” is kind of ugly compared to •) and then change the titles of hundreds of playlists.
But I Only Get These Books to Look at the Diagrams
I’m editing a list of variables and their definitions in a book on structural engineering. fpj is defined as “stress in prestressing tendon due to jacking force”.
Later in the chapter, we learn that the tendon may be stressed by means of a jack or by tightening a nut. A gauge is then used to measure the resulting load.
Manga Artist Wanted
Berkeley West Edge Opera is planning a production of a new musical fantasy based on Mozart’s The Magic Flute, currently with the working title of Tamino’s Magic Flute. We are looking for an artist who is skilled in the visual style of manga and/or anime to work with us.
More information is here (PDF file, 200K). Please feel free to pass it along to any manga artists you may know!
Later: We’ve found our artist and she’s at work now on drawings that will be projected during the show. Some will be scenic backgrounds and others will actually help tell the story. I don’t think I want to say more than that for now.
My Poor Head
I was hit with the fourth bad headache in under a week last night. Ugh ugh ugh ugh. I can’t remember having this many so close together since those awful first months after the surgery over twelve years ago. But apparently there was a thunderstorm in the Bay Area (though not in my part of it) last night, which is the kind of weather that often seems to coincide with my bad headaches. Hopefully things will change for the better soon.
OK
From Greg’s account of Tad’s last day:
Later our friend Carl who I had texted to come to the house quickly told me that — while I was conferring with the nurse in the living room Tad —despite all of the heaving, the nausea, the unbearable pain, the difficulty speaking— looked at him and with gestures and words said: “I (pointing to his chest) am OK (making the OK gesture with his fingers) to die (moving his hand across his adam’s apple). How is Greg?”
I find it hard to put into words quite why that paragraph hits me the way it does, but it captures Tad’s spirit very vividly for me somehow. I can so very easily see Tad doing that, and it makes me choke up and smile at the same time.
Rest in Peace, Tad
My friend Tad died at noon today in the arms of his partner Greg. Blessings on your journey, my friend. Now at long last your suffering is done and you can sleep well and deeply. I’ll miss you, and yet I feel very sure that I haven’t seen the last of you. Your heart was as gentle and unstoppable as an underground spring, and your sweet, loving spirit lives in everyone whose life you touched.
Weekend Update
Dave and I saw CalShakes’s production of GBS’s Candida Friday night. It’s a play I’ve seen several times, but this has got to be the best production I’ve seen.
Dave and I saw Part I of Butterfield 8’s Pride and Prejudice Saturday night. I liked it even better than Part II, which we saw last week. Not sure how much of that is due to the acting being more confident, as it’s another week into the run, and how much to the first half of the novel being livelier than the second. I thought the direction was more varied and inventive in Part I, too, but then, there’s more variety in the first half of the story and thus more to play with; the second half of the novel is more dramatic and more focused on the tumult caused in the Bennett household by — well, if you know the novel, you know what I mean, and if you don’t, I’m not going to spoil the surprise.
I finished the Listener puzzle on the train on the way to Pride and Prejudice. Meh. An interesting idea but not a lot of fun to solve. Too much methodically slogging through possibilities and not enough finding logical inferences.
The rest of my weekend has been spent working on Tamino’s Magic Flute and doing laundry and dealing with the headache I’ve had on and off since Thursday. Now I’m feeling kind of queasy from the painkillers I’ve taken and too wiped to post more right now. I may write more about the plays later after I’m feeling livelier myself.
Scratchings 