Destination Unknown

Movie: Pride and Prejudice

nobody@vox.com(Paxton) — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 16:25:47 -0600

Pride and Prejudice - The Special Edition (A&E, 1996)

I am so secure in my masculinity that I can actually admit to having watched Pride and Prejudice. This is a miniseries on two DVDs that Strix and I watched in two nights. She put it on our Netflix list, and I could have begged off of it, but I decided to throw caution to the wind.

It was actually pretty good. The actress playing Elizabeth (the main character), Jennifer Ehle, in addition to be extremely pretty, has the ability to convey about eight or nine emotions through her facial expressions in two seconds. I was extremely impressed with her acting abilties.

Strix says the story is very true to the book. I'll take her word for it.

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Into the Woods

nobody@vox.com(Paxton) — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 23:21:35 -0600

We went to see Into the Woods at an outdoor amphitheater as performed by Sandstone Productions.

I like this theater. There's something about watching theater outdoors that seems very real. After about two hours on the stone benches, though, and I've had enough reality. This show ran almost three hours long, and I would say that pretty much all of the slack was due to the over-rated song stylings of Stephen Sondheim. The songs in this musical are not that musical, not pleasant to listen to, and I can only imagine that they aren't pleasant to sing, either, though the cast did their best with the material at hand.

The story itself is cute, though I think it, too could have been shorter. I would have been very happy with the play as it ended in Act II, before the intermission. The play is basically a re-telling of several fairy tails - Rappunzel, Little Red Riding Hood, Jack and the Beanstalk, and Cinderella - weaving the stories together into one, inter-related überfairy tale. At the end of Act II, all of the stories are sufficiently interwoven, and have ended in more or less the traditional way. Act III tears all of our traditional stories apart and seems to have an overall theme of "there aren't really any happily ever afters," which, I don't know about you, but I already knew, thank you very much.

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Playbill Committee

nobody@vox.com(Paxton) — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 23:04:43 -0600

The theater group I've been involved in is now having weekly script readings to pick its shows for the 2009-2010 season. Yes, they pick them out a year and a half ahead. They do this because they operate partly off of a grant from Conoco-Phillips, and they have to have their shows planned before the grant application deadline, which is in June.

Basically, we all get together, pick parts, and read through a play that one of the members recommended. Tonight we read A View from the Bridge by Arthur Miller. It's hard to say how a man who was having sex with Marilyn Monroe could write something so depressing. Depressing as it is, however, it's a good play. We'll see if it makes the final list.

Next week, we're reading The Foreigner. I recommended it. The play is almost overdone, but it hasn't played here for about ten years, and it's screamingly funny.

And, on a completely unrelated note...

Please...

Duck Duck Goose

Don't leave personally owned geese.

Seriously.

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The Show Went On

nobody@vox.com(Paxton) — Sun, 20 Apr 2008 14:42:18 -0600

Last night was closing night. Here's one of the articles that came out opening weekend. I'm not sure how long the link will be good.

There was a review Saturday that said we had them "rolling in the aisles." :->

Something I found surprising was the difference in audiences. The first two nights were great. The Sunday matinee I thought someone needed to go out into the audience and check their pulses. The next weekend, Friday was our best show yet, with about 260 people in the audience and an outstanding response to each joke, then last night, closing night, we were back to performing for a room full of crash test dummies. Go figure.

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Scotch on the Rocks

nobody@vox.com(Paxton) — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 23:30:13 -0600

I went on stage tonight, dressed as a woman (a really ugly one, at that), and made a fool of myself to make the audience laugh. This was opening night for "Love, Sex, and the IRS." They did laugh, so... mission accomplished. It would have really sucked if I went through all that and no one thought it was funny.

I've been so busy with rehearsals and work, I haven't blogged or read my neighbor's blogs for a couple of weeks. I will work on getting caught up with it all tomorrow. Tonight, I'm drinking scotch and feeling pretty good about myself.

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Might-Have-Been Worlds

nobody@vox.com(Paxton) — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 23:23:46 -0700

Margaret: Daddy, what is a "might-have-been"?

Dearth: A "might-have-been"? They're ghosts, Margaret! I daresay I "might-have-been" a great swell of a painter, instead of just this uncommonly happy nobody - or again I might have been a worthless idle waster of a fellow.

Margaret: You?

Dearth: Who knows? Some little kink in me might have set off on the wrong road. And that poor soul I might so easily have been might have had no Margaret. I'm sorry for him.

Margaret: And so am I! The poor old daddy, wondering the world without me.

Dearth: There are other "might-have-beens" - lovely ones, but intangible. Shades, Margaret, made of sad folks' thoughts.

- Dear Brutus, Act II, by J. M. Barrie.

Is it possible that this author of Peter Pan also invisioned, in this lesser-known work first performed in 1917, the Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum physics?

What follows is an extreme simplification of the theory, and is about all I understand of it, not being a physicist myself, and therefore might be wrong.

Elementary particles behave in a random fashion. How they behave is, by some degree, determined by chance. For instance, there may be a 10% chance that a particular neutron will decay within a particular second, and a 90% chance that it won't.

The problem this presents for physicists is that in physics thing's aren't really random. For instance, if you were to toss a coin, you might think that there is a 50% chance that the coin will be heads-up when it stops. The truth is that chance is illusory, in this and in every case. The illusion of chance is created by the fact that we, as humans, couldn't possibly know, measure, or calculate all of the variables that will decide whether the coin will land heads or tails. If we could know everything about the coin, the pressure being applied to it by the person flipping it, the weight variable caused on the two sides by the impressions on the coin, etc., and knew how all of those factors would weigh on the outcome and how to calculate it, it would be theoretically possible to predict with 100% accuracy which way the coin would land every time. In other words, it only looks random because we don't know all the facts.

Not a Gambler

But elementary particles are just that - elementary. They consist of nothing smaller but pure energy, which has no further characteristics. So, if there is a 10% chance that the neutron will decay, why is it that sometimes it will decay, and sometimes it won't? Is it true, then, that some parts of the universe are left to pure chance, while everything else has a root cause? The concept lacks aesthetic appeal to physicists, and is one of the reasons why Albert Einstein didn't like quantum theory, stating famously that "God doesn't play dice."

So enter the Many Worlds Interpretation. The Many Worlds Interpretation posits that every time there is a chance that a quantum particle may behave one way or another, the universe splits off into two parallel versions of itself, one in which the neutron decayed, and one in which it didn't. Since these quantum variations are happening around us all that time, that means that based on the theory, there are infinite numbers of parallel universes branching out all the time.

We can think of MWI as positing that universes are "created" every time an elementary particle could randomly do one thing or another, but of course that would require unfathomable amounts of energy to come out of nowhere all of the time. Rather, these universes exist already, and we are reaching them by following various paths along the probability matrices of the quantum particles.

Did Not Win the ASPCA Award

It's important to note that proponents of MWI don't just like the theory for its aesthetics. It also solves a number of paradoxes famous to quantum physics, such as the Schrödinger's Cat paradox. In that thought experiment, a device is set up to kill a cat in a box if a radioactive atom decays. There is a quantum probability that the atom may or may not decay, and we won't know which it was until we look in the box. So, until we look in the box, is the cat alive, dead, or some bizarre, mixture of the two, since we don't know yet what the result of the cosmic dice shoot was? By applying the Many Worlds theory to the problem, the simple answer is that in one universe the cat is alive, and in the other universe the cat is dead. Looking in the box simply confirms to us which universe we're in.

For science fiction fans such as myself, where MWI becomes interesting is when it is extrapolated to the macro level. The decaying of a single atom, with the exception of the poor cat, has little effect on whether any of us live or die, or make it to work on time, or even win the Lotto. Taken in the agregate, however, quantum effects make all the difference in the world, literally. In other words, every event that happens that could have gone one way or another, came out the way that it did because of a general drift in the quantum probabilities that ultimately effected that event.

So, if I notice that the light has turned red too late and slam on the brakes, there are a myriad of factors that will determine whether I slam into another car trying to cross the intersection or whether I slide on through, unharmed. Ultimately, those factors boil down to quantum probabilities, and so in some universes I slid on through the intersection. In this one, I T-boned someone. In fact, anything that is possible, no matter how improbable, happens in at least some of the universes.

Dear Brutus explores these ideas, realizing that our choices lay out ahead of us like a myriad branching paths. We think that we are making a choice, but in fact universes exist in which we take each of these paths, though some universes are more prevalent than others. The universe we are in now is the result of paths taken, and paths not taken are lost to us forever.

Dearth: Three things they say come not back to men nor women--the spoken word, the past life and the neglected opportunity.

- Act I

Those of you who have read the Golden Compass recently will recognize the theory explained nicely there, as well. In Dear Brutus, the characters get to visit those "might-have-been" worlds, shades made of sad folks thoughts, lovely, and intangible.

No Turning Back

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Operation "Bah Humbug" Complete

nobody@vox.com(Paxton) — Sun, 23 Dec 2007 00:40:26 -0700

Participation in my first stage play is now complete. Tonight was our final production of "A Christmas Carol," and it was successful enough that the general manager of the acting troope is talking about making it our "first annual" production of the show. All told, we entertained almost six hundred people, and since half of the procedes were set aside for Big Brothers, Big Sisters, we raised about $2,000 for charity.

And now, I can start concentrating on learning my lines for Dear Brutus, which hits the stage in February.

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Will Dearth

nobody@vox.com(Paxton) — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 22:21:51 -0700

We had a pickup rehearsal for A Christmas Carol tonight at the new theater. It's about three times the size of the Little Theater, where our first two performances were, and it's generally a much nicer facility. I'm looking forward to performing there tomorrow and Saturday.

In the meantime, I did what the director for the next play, Dear Brutus, asked, and wrote up an analysis of my character. Here it is:

My interpretation of Will Dearth: Will was once an aspiring artist, and met Alice while he still had high hopes for his future. She, however, had high hopes of her own, particularly of marrying an ambitious man. Perhaps she thought, but did not say, that he would outgrow his artistic phase and pursue more lucrative means. Instead, he kept at his art, and she became more and more bitter because of it. She caste him in the role of failure, and he increasingly accepted the role, until his loss of joy made him incapable of creating. He says he is a waster, but it’s obvious they have some income, because they are at least better off than she would have been as Mrs. Freddy Finch-Fallow, so I imagine he is employed in some non-descript, dead-end position.

J. M. Barrie’s marriage to actress Mary Ansell was, by some accounts, sexless as well as childless. The childless part of Dearth’s marriage could be a projection of Barrie’s own regret over not having children, and if the animosity Alice feels for Will is a reflection of Mary’s feelings for James, then it’s easy to believe that Barrie’s marriage was sexless, as it is difficult to imagine Alice and Will being physically affectionate considering her hatred of him. Barrie divorced Mary when she refused to end an affair, and so it is possible that the Dearth story line in Dear Brutus is a form of wish fulfillment – wishing that he could show Mary that her life would not have been better off without him so that she would appreciate him more.

Other things we know about Will Dearth:

He is highly educated, or at least educated enough that he can effortlessly toss off a quote from Horace, “O matre pulchra filia pulchrior,” which means, “Oh, beautiful mother with an even more beautiful daughter,” and purposely mistranslate it to tease Margaret.

He is good-spirited, being very willing to take the blame for his failing marriage in his real life and willing to happily give money to a beggar in his fantasy life.

He loves his daughter, Margaret, to such an extent in his fantasy life that he doesn’t miss being married.

He has the dry wit that comes with intelligence and self-confidence, even when he allows himself to be verbally degraded by his wife. Perhaps, even though he allows her to abuse him, he does not really believe it. This could be a bit of a martyr complex. He needs to be needed by someone, and in the absence of Margaret or the love of his wife, he allows her to use him as a scapegoat.

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Movie: Twelfth Night, or What You Will

nobody@vox.com(Paxton) — Sun, 16 Dec 2007 20:52:08 -0700

Twelfth Night

Tonight, we watched a 1996 adaptation of the Shakespeare comedy, Twelfth Night, or What You Will, I had Strix put this on the Netflix list when I thought I might be auditioning for it next Summer, but in the meantime it's been stricken from the repetoire. Pitty, because I would have liked to try it.

This is a good adaptation, though purists may be somewhat upset by the fact that a few of the scenes have been rearranged from the original play, mostly to take advantage of the medium of a movie camera. The biggest problem is the same problem there is with every production of Twelfth Night, which is believing that no one can tell the difference between Viola and her twin brother Sebastian.

In Elizabethan times, I understand it was considered unseemly for women to be on stage, so they used all male casts, even for the female roles. Though I don't know this for certain, I would guess that they used twin boys for the roles of Viola and Sebastian, and being maternal twins they really would look identical.

It also adds the irony of having a male actor playing a female character pretending to be a male character, and fending off the affections of another male actor playing a female character who thinks she's falling in love with a male character. You need a scorecard to keep track of it all. San Francisco has nothing on Shakespeare for gender bending.

Today's sensibilities require us to use female actors to play female characters, but no matter how hard they try, they can't find a female and male duo that look enough alike to pull off the illusion that they are identical.

That being said, this adaptation is well worth watching. If nothing else, watch it for the outstanding performance from Ben Kingsley, who plays the traveling minstrel Feste. There are terrific performances from Helena Bonham Carter as Olivia, Toby Stephens as Orsino, and Imogene Stubbs who is far, far too pretty to pass for a man, no matter what kind of uniform and fake mustache you put on her.

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Thank You, Ghost of the Theater

nobody@vox.com(Paxton) — Sat, 15 Dec 2007 23:26:05 -0700

The performance went extremely well tonight, even better than last night, and then we struck the set. We're playing again next weekend, two performances, but at another theater on the west side of the county.

Since we struck the set, we had to adhere to an old theater tradition, and thank the ghost of the theater for allowing us to perform there. The tradition is, you ask the ghost for permission before you start setting up the set, and you thank him after you tear it down. If you don't, accidents will happen. I don't believe in ghosts, obviously, but it was fun. A Navajo member of our cast also said a Navajo prayer and left an apple for the spirit, so we had a multicultural end-of-run ceremony.

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