Dracula
Posted by Andy Affleck in Art & Entertainment on July 21, 2010
I auditioned for the next Swamp Meadow Community Theater production, Dracula, last Friday. I read for Dracula, Van Helsing, Jack Seward, and thought about reading for Quincy Morris or possibly Renfield. I decided to avoid Renfield as I was concerned about getting locked into being a character actor. Henry was a blast in The Fantasticks but I am more interested in playing a fully formed character rather than someone who is more caricature than character. I figured I was best for Van Helsing given my physique and that I have dutch relatives I could call on the phone to get the accent down. I read Dracula on a lark but not really expecting to get it.
I was pleasantly surprised when I got the call that I was cast as Dracula. I have been getting more excited by the day since I found out. Dracula is, in many ways, the polar opposite of Henry. While both demand attention, they do is in completely different ways. Henry demands people look at him, demands the spotlight (literally), and goes out of his way to emphasize his age or frailty to get attention. Dracula commands attention by sheer power of personality. He has a palpable strength, an underlying malice, and radiates power. When he is in a room (or on the stage) all eyes are on him because you can’t help but look at him. He does nothing specific to call attention to himself and yet he gets that attention. He is also, in the words of the director, a thug. He’s a warrior, a strategist and tactician, and conniving. He takes what he wants but can be subtle when necessary. He’s going to be a fascinating character to get to know and I can’t wait to start rehearsals and get to know the rest of the cast.
Until then, I am reading Bram Stoker’s Dracula (for the first time!) and getting to know Dracula through his words. The play is inspired by the book rather than being an adaptation and the character will not necessarily be the same. But it’s a good place to start. I also want to re-read The HIstorian though not for character research so much as because it was just such a great book. And I am walking every day now. While the director doesn’t need or want the thin-as-a-rail stereotype and prefers a broader-shouldered figure, I am feel that I have some work to do to get my body where I want it for this role.
This all reminds me of when I was in High School. I had had a long run of playing comic relief parts. When Oklahoma came up my junior year, I read for Will Parker assuming that that was the role I would be getting. The director asked me to read Jud Fry and I did to humor her. But she cast me in that role saying that there was something chilling in the way I read it. It ended up being one of the best experiences I had as a young actor (the best being playing Matt in the Fantasticks at about the same time).
Children Online
Posted by Andy Affleck in Technology in Education on July 9, 2010
When my son was in 3rd grade, he attended a Waldorf school where technology and media are severely restricted. We embraced that idea while also feeing a little uncomfortable about it. On the one hand, I agree that kids need to be kids and there should be no rush to have them grow up and be exposed to more adult things. I also came away from my time at the Harvard Graduate School of Education’s Technology in Education program with the firm belief that computers in education make sense at older ages than at younger ages. Kids need the hands-on, get your fingers dirty childhood. All the constructivist (and constructionist) theories and tools can’t hold a candle to actual real-world mucking about. On the other hand, that viewpoint has not held up as well over the years — not because of improvements to educational technology, but rather because of the growth and changes in social media itself.
My son wants a Facebook account. He wants the restrictions to chat removed on his Freerealms account. He’s starting to be bothered by the limits in interactions in Webkinz.com and he wants to video chat with his friends on Skype. Also, he wants to make things. He wants to write games to share with his friends on the Web, he wants to become a YouTube star (so far, I’m helping him do movie reviews) and he wants to write, film, edit, and score a movie (so I signed him up for a mini-camp at the local Apple Store to get him started).
I’m beginning to come around in my thinking. His generation will be far more connected than mine is, or the one in between us. Why should we hold off on introducing him to that world? It’s going to play such a significant role in his life, it seems to me that his education should begin sooner. If he is to be truly successful in the world when he comes of age, he should be armed to the teeth with knowledge and skills. Of course, the big issue is his age. He and his peers are too young. You read about the horror stories of too-young people getting online and not being able to deal with the bullying and pressures that exist out there. Alarmist pieces like Facebook pressure: The horrifying week I spent spying on my 11-year-old daughter help scare parents into keeping the lock down on things like this when, in fact, the author of that very article actually has the solution in her article: supervision.
When our children go out into the world at this age, they never do it alone. We accompany them. I go with my son when he needs to go to the store. I take him to his play dates. I take him to his scouting and karate events. Or he goes with another parent. They are never left alone without adult supervision. This is to keep them safe and to make sure that nothing bad happens. Kids at this age are not that good at seeing consequences to their actions and do many ill-considered things. So we are there to protect them or keep things from getting out of hand. It is our voice that tells them not to get too close to the campfire or to stay off the rocks so no one falls and gets hurt. It is we who tell them to look both ways when crossing the street, to eat their vegetables, to turn off the tv now and get a book, to go to bed now, to not treat their friend that way, and to call their grandmother. We are guiding them and teaching them how to work within our society. We tell them when to say please and thank you so they learn this. We pay attention to their social interactions to help prevent them from becoming bullies or complete introverts.
But we tell them that they cannot go online yet. We give them this prohibition to all things online because we are scared of the bullying and the predators out there. Even though predation is a vastly overblown worry and even bullying is far less of a problem than the media would have you believe. And we latch onto things like Facebook’s age limits. “Kids must be 13 to get a Facebook account!” So we hide behind that or we teach our kids that lying about their age is OK to get them in early. (Ironically, the age restriction is not there for their protection but rather the way these sites handle COPPA. See How COPPA Fails Parents, Educators, Youth for an explanation). But all of these things assume that we are going to hand over the computer and walk away.
Instead, we should be starting to walk our kids into this online world the way we walk them into the real world. Let them get online but supervise them. Allow them to start exploring and learning how the online world works but stay with them on this journey until you can let them go alone, the same way we are already doing this in the real world. If you see bullying in the real world, you call the parent of the offending child and hope that they will do something about it. If you see it online, you can do the same thing. And if the parent fails to act, then you can block that person (something you can’t actually do in the real world). If your own child is inappropriate or bullying, you are there to stop it and explain how social networks work (or should work). In short, you teach them, you socialize them just as you do in the real world.
Of course, this plan falls down as many of the parents in my generation have no clue about this stuff and wouldn’t know how to properly supervise their children online (though, of course, you can accomplish most of it by just sitting with your children as they explore online so you are there to correct or guide). I wish there were an online course for parents to teach them what they need to know to do their jobs correctly in the new media space. And I also wish our schools would take up the mantle and find a way to properly add these tools to their curricula so that children learn to use them smartly, and ethically.
Bringing it back to my own family, I am not saying that I am going to let my son lie and get a Facebook account. I do still believe that we must consider age appropriateness. He is just learning how to use the phone to call his friends (we still have to remind him to be polite to adults, tell them who he is when he calls, and things like that) and he really can’t type that well yet, and, frankly, he’s 10. There’s plenty of time. But my reasons for holding him back from at least the social networking side of things is not about fear but rather from a belief that he is not mature or socially ready yet. I think he will be long before he’s 13 but I’ll deal with that conundrum then. Meanwhile, he can create all the content he wants and start his own blog and more. I’ll be there to guide him just as I am out in the real world.
Doctor Who
Posted by Andy Affleck in Art & Entertainment on July 8, 2010
Without spoilers, let me just say that this last season of Doctor Who with Matt Smith as the Doctor and Karen Gillan as Amy Pond has been utterly fantastic. I have loved nearly every moment of it and was so glad to see that the ending was… well, not Russel T. Daviesesque. Stephen Moffat is doing an amazing job and I hope he continues it for many seasons to come. Well done!
(Images from Springfield Punx by Dean Fraser)
Cognitive Surplus
Posted by Andy Affleck in Deep Thoughts on July 7, 2010
This evening, I’ve been grooving on my friend Owen Gottlieb’s wonderful blog, Mystical Creative. He and I talked on the phone this evening in a conversation spanning game design, e-learning, and, of course, the Jerky Boys (it’s a college thing). Among the wonderful stuff he has there, I especially liked this TED talk by Clay Shirky on Cognitive Surplus.
Reading in a Whole New Way
Posted by Andy Affleck in Books and Writing, Deep Thoughts on July 7, 2010
Kevin Kelly, an author I’ve long enjoyed reading (see Out of Control, a book that had a profound impact on my thinking about technology back in the mid-90′s) has written an interesting piece on the future of reading for Smithsonian’s 40th anniversary issue titled Reading in a Whole New Way. He makes a lot of very interesting and, I think, prescient points. He talks about the ubiquity of screens and that they will soon be watching us in turn. He says that reading will become a much more physical activity much like Tom Cruise’s character in Minority Report. These days, I read more and more on my iPhone using the Amazon Kindle app, iBooks, GoodReader, Stanza, and the Borders eBooks App. I have been having fun locating free books in pdf or epub format and getting them onto my iPhone to read. I am, for all intents and purposes, an advocate for eReaders. That said, I do not believe that the physical book is going to go away anytime soon. There is something about the feel and smell of a real book, the permanence of the physical object, and the simple fact that there are just some places you can’t or at least don’t want to bring a book (the beach comes to mind). As this next generation grows up into the digital world we inhabit and as their kids grows up, this will certainly shift more and more to screens from paper but I don’t think we’ll see the paper book go away. Not within my lifetime anyway. Perhaps when the technology is advanced enough, we’ll see objects that look and feel just like real books (pages and all) but that display digital content beautifully. Whatever your thoughts, Kelly’s article is a great read (especially online, using the new “Reader” capability of the latest Safari.) (Found via The Technium)
Writing
Posted by Andy Affleck in Books and Writing on July 7, 2010
I woke up early this morning and sat down to write. This is something I’ve wanted to do for a very long time but never set aside the time or space to do it. Instead, my early mornings and late evenings have been dealing with tending farm, working on my frontier land and cabin, building new and updated buildings in my kingdom, and fighting dragons. Yesterday, I stopped and realized that what little free time I have when I am not at work or doing things with my son were being eaten up by what I always called “Stupid Facebook Games.” So, I quit. Just like that. I removed all of the apps, their permissions, unsubscribed from their mailing lists, and blocked them from showing up on my wall. It was liberating.
So, I woke up early as I always do and sat down to write. Alas, I only wrote a single paragraph today and not a very good one, but it was a start and I’m glad I did it and look forward to continuing tomorrow. If you want to write, write every day, they say. And so I will. Before this, I only ever wrote daily during NaNoWriMo and the three years I have done that have always been wonderful. However, NaNoWriMo is a different sort of writing. There, you write with reckless abandon. You plough forward, never looking back, never editing, never questioning. Your goal is word count, not art. And it is liberating but it also has given me an incorrect view of what writing is. As I began working on this short story idea I have wanted to play with for some time, I realized that I can’t write like that anymore. I need to structure. I need to plan. I need to balance expository dialogue with action and description. I need to care whether my characters sound and feel real. I need the world I am crafting to be fully realized (at least enough for a short story). I could probably write the story in one marathon session and then go back and edit it but that somehow feels like the wrong approach. So, I am stepping back and working out the outline. I want to know where my story is going before I try to go too far into it.
I want to read more, especially paying attention to the craft as much as the story itself. I want to look for a writing class somewhere locally. I want to learn from other writers what works and doesn’t work for how they work and begin to find a process that works for me. So, that is the journey I am undertaking now. And it feels wonderful and exciting.
Laurie Anderson: Homeland
Posted by Andy Affleck in Art & Entertainment on June 23, 2010
Anyone who knows me knows that I have long been a huge fan of Laurie Anderson’s work (dating back to High School when Paul made me listen to O Superman (For Massenet). In college I studied a lot of experimental and modern music and spent endless hours locked in the Bregman Electronic Music Studio composing strange things, much of which was deeply inspired by Anderson’s music. When Strange Angels came out, I remember after I finished DJing a dance party at my Co-Ed Fraternity, I put the new CD on and I pulled a small couch to the middle of the empty living room and listened to the whole thing at 2 in the morning on the sound system. To this day, my friend JIm and I are likely to start a conversation by quoting Hansel and Gretel in The Dream Before: “Hansel and Gretel are alive and well and they’re living in Berlin. She says, ‘Hansel, you’re really bringing me down.’ And he says, ‘Gretel? You can really be a bitch.’”
When I learned a few weeks ago that she had a new CD coming out based on a few years of live shows she’s done around the world, I was beside myself. I listened to it on NPR’s website, streamed up until the album’s release yesterday.
Homeland harkens back to her earlier works reminding me more of United States or Big Science than the more recent works such as Bright Red. Anderson talks about how the music is far more improvisational, that she went on the road without anything being complete or settled and worked with different musicians and spaces and ideas and how the music evolved over time. It has a spontaneous feel to it while still being deeply grounded in what I easily recognize as Anderson’s style of sound (though I couldn’t begin to properly describe it, and I’ve tried!)
The music is also more political than I remember her being in previous works and I like it very much. The song Only an Expert, easily my favorite so far, pokes good fun (though with an undercurrent of anger) at the modern sound machine that politics, news, and discourse has devolved into.
I actually went to a Fye and purchased the physical album rather than getting it on Amazon or iTunes as is my usual M.O. music in part because it comes with a DVD that I would not have otherwise gotten and in part because there are a few artists that I still prefer to have physical media than pure digital files.
An album release like this is one of those rare events that I love. I don’t often get to completely lose myself both in music and the memories the previous releases bring out in me. It’s been too long since her last album. I hope I don’t have to wait so long for the next one.
Blogging & Social Networking… Too Many Tools!
Posted by aaffleck in Computer Geekiness, Deep Thoughts on June 16, 2010
I am having social network fatigue. First, there are the long-form posting sites — my main blog, Posterous and Tumblr (though the latter may be argued as a short-form site too). Then there’s the quick snippet land of Facebook and Twitter. Then there’s the GPS-aware side of things like Foursquare, Loopt, MyTown, and Yelp! (I have since given up on Gowalla and Brightkite as not being particularly interesting to me).
The GPS group are getting a long form post from me soon enough as I have been evaluating them with an eye towards a blog post for some time now. At least that’s how I justify to my wife my continued use of them…
What I’m trying to figure out now is how I should talk to the world without having to worry about where I am writing. I am not a power blogger. I don’t really feel the need to blast 20 posts a day out there and I am not trying to set myself up as an expert in any particular field to make my site a destination for those in that field and resume fodder. I could just do things in my WordPress site and have my Posterous and Tumblr sites auto-carry the posts or at least links back to them and have links auto-posted to Twitter and Facebook. But I also like the ultra-simplicity offered by Tumblr and Posterous. It is just easier to pull a post together.
And then there’s the fact that I like posting pictures from my iPhone (not so much text — while I don’t hate the iPhone keyboard, I am just not interested in trying to type a lot on it) and I feel that it is much easier to go directly to Facebook or Tumblr than it is my WP site (yes, I have the app, I still find it a longer process than these other methods).
Maybe my problem is that I can’t commit to just one program and stick to that. I like so much of each of them that I want the freedom to use all of them whenever I feel like it.
I wonder what the rest of the world does. Where do you post and where do you ignore? How important is it to you to get your stuff out to as many sites as possible versus using just one and trusting that your audience (friends, family, whoever) can and will find it?
Fantastic
Posted by aaffleck in Art & Entertainment on May 25, 2010
We’ve completed the first of two weekends of The Fantasticks and the show has been going very well! I was worried in the middle of last week — our Wednesday rehearsal wasn’t confidence building — but by Thursday it all fell together and the subsequent three performances were really good! Come on out and see us this weekend, our final weekend!
The Fantasticks!
Posted by aaffleck in Art & Entertainment on May 6, 2010
After 25 years, I have finally fulfilled a longtime dream of mine: to get back on the stage and do a play again! In a few short weeks I will be appearing in the Swamp Meadow Community Theater’s production of The Fantasticks. This is one of my all time favorite shows. I performed in it in high school as Matt, the male lead. Now I am playing Henry Albertson, an old actor, quite theatrical and vainglorious for his supposed glory days and lost youth. Every time I have seen this show (and I have seen it many times over the years) Henry has always stolen the show so, as you would expect, I am having a ball with the part. You can reserve your tickets at the Swamp Meadow Box Office and show dates are May 21, 22, 28 and 29 @ 7:00 pm and May 23 and 30 @ 2:00pm at the Isaac Paine School in Foster, RI.
I have been regularly photographing rehearsals (any that I am in are courtesy of my son who came to a rehearsal) and just having so much fun. The cast is great and the show promises to be, if you forgive the pun, fantastic.
2009 NaNoWriMo
