First: if I haven't mentioned it to you, I'm currently in rehearsals for The Rude Mechanicals' latest staging of Much Ado About Nothing! It runs weekends from May 9-17 (with a min $5 pay-what-you-will preview night on May 7) at the Greenbelt Arts Center. Tickets available here!

So last night I came in from rehearsal with an inclination to play with tie knots, since I was casually pondering knots different characters might wear. (Our version of Much Ado is set in a law firm; many of the characters are lawyers or lawyer-adjacent and therefore wear ties.) It's a thing I feel like many productions and media in general overlook -- understandably so; most men really don't put much thought into the knots they tie (if they even know more than one or two knots), so I imagine that knowledge isn't a high priority for costumers -- but I always appreciate when media does take it into account. (Arrow remains the gold standard for this; I also recall the first Ant-Man being noteworthy for the quality if not the diversity of the knots depicted.) (more...)

Welp, I finished watching Wicked Part 1. I hated that movie like few things I watch, though admittedly part of what earns media this degree of hatred is the overwhelming degree of love that everyone else seems to hold for it? (Stop reading now if you haven't seen it yet and care about spoilers -- I don't go into depth but you'll definitely walk away knowing a few reveals.)

I imagine most of the viewers singing this film's praises see themselves as Elphaba and revel in her triumph of self-actualization: whereas my strongest connection in this film was to the increasingly silenced animals.** Therefore, what I saw is a protagonist rejecting self-advancement and taking a stand -- good! -- and then nevertheless spinning that off into a prolonged musical number about her own greatness and strength in defying gravity with nary a mention of the noble cause that animated her, because it wasn't *actually* that cause that moved her. (more...)

This is mostly a test post -- but some very talented folks I know have a play opening today! Here's a trailer:

And here's a link to a 5-star review of the show over at TheatreBloom. (I don't think any show *I've* been in has ever gotten 5 stars! Pout.) Check 'em out, and join us at the Greenbelt Arts Center if you're local!

I have viewed the first of the anime movies I queued up on Tubi! I started with Hells (2008), which actually began quite promisingly before devolving into characters screaming nonsense exposition (major characters were revealed to be Cain and Abel, also the talking cat was God) and optimistic bullshit ("I'll never give up!" "You can do anything if you just believe!") at each other around the 20-minute mark, which they energetically kept up for the remainder of the nearly 2-hour film. It was deeply stupid and kinda exhausting to watch.

BUT I did like many of the character designs... which nagged at me, since I found some of them *incredibly* familiar. Googling confirmed that this anime was based on a 2002-2004 manga that featured character designs also utilized in the 1998-2001 toyline Resurrection of Monstress.

I'd actually picked up one at Otakon in my late teenage years -- the pink/purple repaint of the witch character Noctilca -- and I've got another one from a friend in a random fodder lot. (If I haven't already dismembered her, she may be rescued for the collection.) So as much as I ultimately did not enjoy Hells, I appreciated the unexpected callback to my convention days and figures of yesteryear? Anime conventions were great places to find toys before ticket prices ballooned and shipping fees dropped, and I really did enjoy wandering the dealer's rooms in search of neat new figures from lines I'd never encountered before. Ah well -- nothing good lasts forever. And fortunately, while Hells was decidedly not good, it did not last forever either.

(Plastic endures for a good long while, though. <3)

A thing I've been pondering today: the extent to which we associate cleanliness with emptiness (and also the extent to which we apply that idea not just to how we organize our spaces but how we approach topics like mental health, relationships of various kinds, and even the types of personalities we seek out and try to cultivate). I'm not sure that we necessarily perceive clutter as "dirty" in *precisely* the same way, but we definitely have a similar view of it that makes it relevant in this discussion as well.

And then the clutter got me thinking about libraries. Somehow old-school libraries (and, it occurs to me, old-style museums) come off as cluttered even in their natural states, which could partly explain the zeal across the country to renovate and modernize them by *REMOVING MANY OF THE BOOKS* and prioritizing the addition of more open community spaces. (Having recently *finally* visited the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture, I'm also inclined to think of more modern museum exhibits here -- I definitely dislike said exhibits, and somehow they come off as less *organized* to me than the more classic designs even though they may boast greater economy of space and cutting-edge technological effects and whatnot.) (more...)