Mhendrix22

Kambhorn and Vestrahorn, by Nonac_eos.

crashinglybeautiful:

Yu Chengyou, “Night in a Small Village,” multi-block woodcut, printed with oil-based ink, 1984. From The Revolving Moon: 25 Prints from China, via: 50 Watts, and with thanks to Wood s Lot.

you’re on a stage, not on a screen. so stop taking inspiration from movies, where someone has controlled lighting and framing and sound design. see plays, where they are using the same tools you have available to you in your improv shows: real people, monologues, interplay between real humans, big choices, specific wordplay, emotional reactions, minimal costumes and props (more often than not at least), dramatic loaded pauses, movement up and down stage, facing forward, big deep exhales you can hear, etc.

and make fun of plays too. that’s your medium.

Saturday Night Live, a tv show, makes fun of tv shows.

National Lampoon, a magazine, makes (made) fun of magazines.

So if you’re doing improv on a stage, you should make fun of plays. watch plays. do parodies of plays. be happy forever.

10 points to anyone who tells this joke out load at parties.

Boundary Stone in the news.

You can click on the link to read the entire Washington Post article.


 Boundary Stone tweet tips off ruckus over restaurant minimum wage bill

By Tim Carman and Fritz Hahn, Updated: November 19 at 9:44 pm

Geeks! My friends at GaymerConnect have a kickstarter for their awesome 90s nostalgia game. Ouya is doing matching funds if they make their goal! Please give it a look.

You are carrying:

  a half-idea

  an accent you do when you’re out of ideas

  a list of specials to say in case you’re a waiter

  a mimed glass

577
579
590
615
657
659
665
706
707
756
757
847
872
897
928
959
968
974
978
984
985
1492
1569

New Balance Men’s Waking Shoes: 577, 659, 665, 706, 756, 959, 968, 978, 985, 156

Pope’s deaths: 579, 590, 615, 657, 707, 757, 872, 897, 974, 984, 1492

Both: 847, 928

Demon, day 198.

Commit hard and bury your friend. Only after the scene has been swept, dig him up and call a doctor.

Late-1946, English novelist Sylvia Townsend Warner received a Christmas present from friend and fellow writer, Alyse Gregory, that was to inspire what must surely be one of the most exquisite thank you letters ever written. The gift in question was an empty matchbox; Warner's magnificent response can be read below.

(Source: The Letters of Sylvia Townsend Warner; Image: Sylvia Townsend Warner, via NYRB Classics.)

23:xii:1946

Dearest Alyse,

Usually one begins a thank-letter by some graceless comparison, by saying, I have never been given such a very scarlet muffler, or, This is the largest horse I have ever been sent for Christmas. But your matchbox is a nonpareil, for never in my life have I been given a matchbox. Stamps, yes, drawing-pins, yes, balls of string, yes, yes, menacingly too often; but never a matchbox. Now that it has happened I ask myself why it has never happened before. They are such charming things, neat as wrens, and what a deal of ingenuity and human artfulness has gone into their construction; for if they were like the ordinary box with a lid they would not be one half so convenient. This one though is especially neat, charming, and ingenious, and the tray slides in and out as though Chippendale had made it.

But what I like best of all about my matchbox is that it is an empty one. I have often thought how much I should enjoy being given an empty house in Norway, what pleasure it would be to walk into those bare wood-smelling chambers, walls, floor, ceiling, all wood, which is after all the natural shelter of man, or at any rate the most congenial. And when I opened your matchbox which is now my matchbox and saw that beautiful clean sweet-smelling empty rectangular expanse it was exactly as though my house in Norway had come true; with the added advantage of being just the right size to carry in my hand. I shut my imagination up in it instantly, and it is still sitting there, listening to the wind in the firwood outside. Sitting there in a couple of days time I shall hear the Lutheran bell calling me to go and sing Lutheran hymns while the pastor's wife gazes abstractedly at her husband in a bower of evergreen while she wonders if she remembered to put pepper in the goose-stuffing; but I shan't go, I shall be far too happy sitting in my house that Alyse gave me for Christmas.

Oh, I must tell you I have finished my book—begun in 1941 and a hundred times imperilled but finished at last. So I can give an undivided mind to enjoying my matchbox.

(Signed)

P.S. There is still so much to say...carried away by my delight in form and texture I forgot to praise the picture on the back. I have never seen such an agreeable likeness of a hedgehog, and the volcano in the background is magnificent.

“

What I value about the improv community is that it’s a community. It’s certainly competitive. Everybody is ambitious and wants to get ahead and succeed, but the nature of the scene is predicated on not singular exceptionalism but ensemble. I feel that ethos is what makes the improv world a very collaborative world.

It’s no mistake that I get a lot more jobs now that my friends are in positions to run their own shows. Everybody in our world is always looking out for each other. There are certainly those people for whom it’s all about them, but those are few and far between in the improv world. It’s more about teams, whether it’s a sketch group or an improv team, everything is based on the ensemble. That began then and continues now.

”

- Jason Mantzoukas (in an interview with Splitsider)

Hey!  Recognize the set of this National Journal cover?
   
Big Bear Café!
 

phoebe-bird:

Carson Elllis.

Back in 2006, a group of students at Xavier High School in New York City (one of whom, "JT," submitted this letter) were given an assignment by their English teacher, Ms. Lockwood, that was to test their persuasive writing skills: they were asked to write to their favourite author and ask him or her to visit the school. Five of those pupils chose Kurt Vonnegut. His thoughtful reply, seen below, was the only response the class received.

Transcript follows.

(Letter kindly submitted by JT; Image: Kurt Vonnegut, via.)



Transcript

November 5, 2006

Dear Xavier High School, and Ms. Lockwood, and Messrs Perin, McFeely, Batten, Maurer and Congiusta:

I thank you for your friendly letters. You sure know how to cheer up a really old geezer (84) in his sunset years. I don't make public appearances any more because I now resemble nothing so much as an iguana.

What I had to say to you, moreover, would not take long, to wit: Practice any art, music, singing, dancing, acting, drawing, painting, sculpting, poetry, fiction, essays, reportage, no matter how well or badly, not to get money and fame, but to experience becoming, to find out what's inside you, to make your soul grow.

Seriously! I mean starting right now, do art and do it for the rest of your lives. Draw a funny or nice picture of Ms. Lockwood, and give it to her. Dance home after school, and sing in the shower and on and on. Make a face in your mashed potatoes. Pretend you're Count Dracula.

Here's an assignment for tonight, and I hope Ms. Lockwood will flunk you if you don't do it: Write a six line poem, about anything, but rhymed. No fair tennis without a net. Make it as good as you possibly can. But don't tell anybody what you're doing. Don't show it or recite it to anybody, not even your girlfriend or parents or whatever, or Ms. Lockwood. OK?

Tear it up into teeny-weeny pieces, and discard them into widely separated trash recepticals. You will find that you have already been gloriously rewarded for your poem. You have experienced becoming, learned a lot more about what's inside you, and you have made your soul grow.

God bless you all!

Kurt Vonnegut

Share and Enjoy:

Share and Enjoy:

Hey geeks! I'm auctioning a caricature to raise funds for some friends. Check it out!

Barry Raynor is out 2-3 weeks with a concussion sustained in a Wednesday morning meeting.

Victor Paulson tested positive for Adderall, steroids, cocaine, and HGH during a random drug test. Suspended two weeks.

Julia Freeman got into an altercation with a coworker during orientation. They were told to break it up and then patted on their butts by their boss.

Management terminated accounting supervisor Bryan Taylor after determining his pending murder charges proved too much of a distraction at Shaw Capital.

Congratulations to our CEO for a brilliant acquisition, after which several board members dumped a water cooler over his head. The contracts were completely destroyed and we are looking for a new conference table due to water damage.

George O’Brien was fined $30,000 for excessively celebrating a great parking spot in the office lot.

Federal authorities issued a statement saying that although Shaw Capital’s insider trading scheme was illegal, it is not reviewable by replay and therefore the profits will stand.

Without singling out anyone in particular, this is just a reminder that getting down on one knee to pray to God in the middle of a performance review is at best a distraction, and frankly it raises a lot of questions about your progress here at Shaw Capital.

As the result of an ongoing strike, we’ve hired new replacement supervisors to prevent a company wide lockout. We’re confident high school math league students can effectively oversee our multi-billion dollar corporation while we determine a way to screw the supervisors out of a few thousand bucks.

Troy Benton, a legendary collegiate-level insurance salesman, surprisingly wasn’t hired by any marketing firms despite posting a very impressive LinkedIn profile this year. He will continue to sell insurance door-to-door as a senior.

Congratulations to Stu Foreman for a long, storied career with our company, as he retires at age 28.

Tamas Dezso, from Notes for an Epilogue, his photo series on Romania, its traditions, and time.

A little art

1. Loose Bottom
2. Arsemonger
3. Sandy Balls
4. Flesh Shank
5. Booby Dingle
6. Twat
7. Hen Poo
8. Mingebag
9. Pisser Claugh
10. Penistone
11. Dancing Dicks
12. Shitterton
13. Lickfold
14. Bladdered

Village Names: 1, 3, 4, 5, 7, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13
British Insults: 2, 8, 14
Both: 6

Quentin Vijoux.

Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows:

lachesism n. the desire to be struck by disaster—surviving a plane crash, losing everything in a fire, plunging over a waterfall—which would put a kink in the smooth arc of your life, and forge it into something hardened and flexible and sharp, not just a stiff prefabricated beam that barely covers the gap between one end of your life and the other.

[Image: Valve chamber for City Water Tunnel No. 3; Instagram by BLDGBLOG].

I had the pleasure last week of visiting an enormous valve chamber 200' beneath Central Park for the official opening of City Water Tunnel No. 3.

[Image: Mayor Bloomberg opens the tunnel; Instagram by BLDGBLOG].

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg was there to offer his own perspective on the value of urban infrastructure, and the colossal valves themselves were opened only a few hours later, bringing drinking water through the $5 billion tunnel, to residents of Lower Manhattan, for the very first time.

[Image: Waiting for the water to flow through Tunnel No. 3; Instagram by BLDGBLOG].

After no fewer than 43 years of construction, it was a pretty amazing ceremony to attend, sitting there at the end of Bloomberg's reign, amidst security personnel, in a cathedral-like space beneath Central Park, reporters spread out across pews of blue plastic chairs arranged in what felt like a Romanesque side-chapel radiating off from the barrel vault of the central nave.

A manhole beneath our chairs was a surreal indication that, even here, 200' beneath the city, much deeper levels lay hidden below (in fact, the actual water tunnel itself was another 400' beneath us).

[Image: The labyrinth of smaller pipes that feed from and lead to Tunnel No. 3; Instagram by BLDGBLOG].

For many more photographs—that aren't limited to Instagrams—and a much longer write-up, click through to Gizmodo.

(Vaguely related: Subterranean Machines Resurrections and The Windowless Hall of Tides).

The mysterious goblin shark sports a jaw that pretty much looks like it’s trying to escape from the animal’s face.

Doing an emergency server swap, I'm afraid. We hope there will be a minimum of bugs, but please let us know if anything is funky.

Demon day 191. I need the perspective police. The perspective patrol.