Metapattern

Sphere - low surface, high volume

Just thought I would post this video of some intense guitar work I really enjoy.



-Alex

My people are so awesome

I took this picture a while ago in a Chinese cafe/restaurant.

Kevin

Sliding Scale of Emo Haiku (Alex and Boyd) [Extra Credit]

I just stubbed my toe
It really really really
Effing hurts like hell

My parents hate me
They grounded me yesterday
My life is tragic

There is no light at
The end of the tunnel so
We shall all despair

My soul is so dark
Like a dark fluttery thing
Flying in the night

My girlfriend dumped me
There is no hope in this world
My blood falls like rain

By Alex and Boyd

Feel free to add your own!

Extra Credit: writing (Boyd) [Long post is loooooooong]

I've been working this bit of story over and around in my head for the last few weeks. I wish I could hide part of the text behind a link like you can in Livejournal, 'cause I don't mean to spam, but I don't think it's possible. Oh, well. I'd e-mail it, but considering my ongoing e-mail issues, I don't want to risk it.

A Friendly Misunderstanding

"Mark? Is that you?" a surprised feminine voice exclaimed from behind us. Mark flinched slightly, but paused to look over his shoulder, his warning glance to me as he did so telling me he was already planning to politely dismiss whomever had spotted him. Instead, his eyes lit up as he apparently caught sight of the person who had called out his name.

"Carl? Amy? What brings you two to this side of town?" Mark asked, his voice warm with affection as he stopped walking, grabbed my upper arm and turned us both around. Approaching us across the crowded sidewalk were two people, both looking to be about Mark's age, and dressed in what I took to be the fashionable clothes of the area. They both looked very happy to see Mark, and I couldn't help the stab of apprehension in my stomach. Surely he wouldn't... Mark smiled as the two reached us. "Not out looking for some 'quality' entertainment, I hope?" he said, his tone joking. The three of them laughed, and the man spoke up for the first time, his voice rich and deep.

"Nothing of the sort, old friend. We're just in town to have dinner with the in-laws," he said, grimacing melodramatically. Mark winced in apparent sympathy, and the female whacked the side of his head affectionately.

"My parents are perfectly good people! I don't know what your guys' problem is!" she scolded, but there was no real anger in her tone. I smiled at their interaction, and she seemed to notice me for the first time.

"And who is this, Mark?" she gestured in my direction, smiling. "Going for some of that 'quality' entertainment, yourself? You ought to be ashamed!" Mark rolled his eyes.

"You know me better than that, Amy." He gestured to me. "Carl, Amy, I'd like you to meet... Rob. He's a..." Mark paused, obviously not quite recalling the details of our cover story. I jumped in, hoping my lack of proficiency with the language wouldn't be too off-putting.

"Hello I am Rob. I will be... visiting student?" I paused, unsure of the word I meant. My audience nodded, though, Mark apparently content to let me finish my 'story' myself, and 'Amy' gestured politely for me to continue. I took a deep breath, my confidence bolstered by their evident understanding, and started talking again in the same halting fashion. "I will be visiting student here in this place for... time, maybe? I hope to... learn customs, and of the blending in of here for before to go home. Okay?"

Mark, who'd been nodding encouragingly along with me as I spoke, broke into a little impromptu bout of applause as soon as I finished and clapped me on the back. "Good job, buddy!" I smiled brightly, and Carl and Amy smiled back. Suddenly, the bells of the big city clock began to chime the time, and Amy started sharply.

"Oh, gracious, do you hear that? We're going to be late for dinner!" Carl cheered, and she thwacked him on the arm. "I hope you're not this rude when you're alone around them. Are you?" Carl schooled his face into a more appropriate, excited expression, and Mark snorted. Amy mock-glared at him, and then back at Carl. "Honestly, you two..." She threw up her hands and set off down the sidewalk again. "Come on, Carl! We don't want to keep them waiting!"

Carl rolled his eyes at Mark and me. "Heaven forbid, huh?" he murmured conspiratorially, leaning in for a second. Then, with a sigh, he straightened. "Well, I'm off. 'Bye, Mark," he said, saluting him cockily, and then turned to me, his hand swinging out of the salute and toward me as he moved. "And nice meeting you... 'Rhobb', was it?"

I nodded and grabbed his hand with my own, shaking it with a smile. "Nice to be meeting of you!" I exclaimed. Unexpectedly, the moment I grabbed his hand, the smile fell off of Carl's face as if I'd struck him. I felt Mark grab my shoulders and pull me sharply back from Carl, breaking our handshake with an apologetic smile and a completely fake laugh. He set me back down on my feet again a good foot or so away with his back to his friend, ostensibly to make sure I wasn't going to fall, and shot me a glare before glancing back over his shoulder at Carl. The man was staring at his hand as if it had suddenly turned orange.

Mark's voice was apologetic as he called out to his friend. "Heh, so sorry, Carl! Forgive him, please, he's only been here a night or so!" Carl seemed to shake off whatever shock I'd inadvertently caused him and looked up at Mark with a smile.

"I hope he doesn't do that to you!" he said laughingly, then mock-saluted Mark once more. "Oh, well, I'm off to face the cour—I mean, in-laws! Good luck with your 'student'!" And he headed off into the crowd after his wife. As soon as he was out of sight, Mark pushed me into the nearest alleyway, his expression furious.

"What did you do that for? Those are my friends!" I stared at him haplessly.

"What... what I do?" I struggled for the words to express my confusion. "I were just try to... to be friendly..." Mark snorted.

"A little too friendly, I think. You're lucky he didn't punch you!" I blinked, completely lost.

"But... all I do was shake his hand!" I insisted. Mark rolled his eyes at me.

"I don't care what they call it on your planet! Frankly, I can't believe you guys do that in public!"

"But what I do wrong??" I shouted at him in frustration, starting to feel angry at his lack of explanation. He started at the loudness of my voice, then stared at me in surprise.

"You mean... that's a friend thing, on your planet? That shake-thing?"

I glared at him. "Yes. We... call a handshake; we do when meet new people. Why, what you do?"

Mark blinked, then his eyes went wide in sudden understanding. "Oh! I get it." He gestured to the street at the mouth of the alleyway. "You mean... that's just how you greet one another, where you're from? That...uh..." He faltered, having trouble with the word, before shaking his head and picking up where he'd left off. "I mean, it's not... intimate, or anything?" I looked at him, perplexed.

"Duh. We not do if otherwise. Why?"

Mark gestured, trying to think of something. "Remember... remember how Don greeted you, when we found you? Remember how you freaked out?"

I shuddered at the memory. "How I forget? I mean, he licked m..." I looked up at Mark suddenly, understanding. "Oh." He nodded. "Oh. You mean, for you, handshake is like lick for me?" He paused, probably working out from the context of my sentence the meaning of my foreign words, then nodded.

"Yeah."

"Well... crap. Sorry. I no idea. I should apologize him?" I gestured to the mouth of the alley. Mark made to grab me, probably thinking I was just going to go running out into the crowd or do something equally foolish.

"Wait, stop! If ap...app..." He stopped, sounding out the word. "'Appolijize', means what I think it means, then it's all right. He's an easy-going guy; he's not going to take offense or anything. I mean, we told him you were foreign, right? I'm always hanging out with weird people; he won't make too much of it."

I sighed, relaxing. After a moment, he let go of my shoulders. When I didn't move toward the street, he relaxed minutely as well. We stared at each other for a moment in the semi-dark of the alleyway, silently, and I felt suddenly, profoundly alone, on this planet so far away from everything I knew, where so many things seemed just the same while other things were just so different.

Before I could descend into melancholy, though, Mark clapped his hands decisively. "So. How about I come through on my promise to take you to a night at the movies, or 'mooveez', as you called them? How does that sound?"

I perked up at the suggestion. "Really? Even though I... I..." He nodded.

"What better way for you to learn to blend in than through watching our movies? At least, that's what aliens do all the time in those sci-fi films, right? It can't hurt. After all," he put his arm around my shoulders and led me back toward the sidewalk, back out into the city, "that's what you're here for, right? To learn?" I nodded, smiling, and he smiled back. As we walked back into the wash of lights, I caught myself thinking that maybe this might not be so bad, after all.

Update

Edited our profile. Feel free to modify anything I've changed. :)

Live Design Lighting

Okay, so I tested the lights after class and the lights we will likely be using are the 3rd and 5th switches.

3rd switch will turn on the stage light, and the 5th switch will turn off the light. It takes about 1-2 seconds for the light to fully turn on and fully turn off, so it might be difficult to do the stop motion and pull it off looking perfect, but we'll see. I would think that the second the light goes off, the person who's doing the lights should immediately turn the light back on.

I'm not entirely sure how dark the stage will get and if people will be able to see us in the dark or not.

My computer (yes, a PC) died again yesterday. That's the 4th time in 3 weeks. My Norton antivirus expired or stopped working for some reason about 3 weeks ago, and ever since I downloaded McAfee Antivirus on my computer 3 weeks ago, its been having problems. And there's no other Antivirus that I can get, because my computer can't install anything else (the guys at ResNet already tried) for some reason.

Go Macs.

Kevin

Meeting Today

There is a meeting today, Tuesday 6/2, at Joe's at 2 PM. We will be finishing up our preparation for our stage design.

Be there.

TA10 Final Exam Topics

- Theater Company Hierarchy & Static categories (Howard)
- Metapatterns (Volk)
- The door (Aronson)
- Image versus Sign (States)
- Spectacle/Media (Aronson)
- Metaphor (Borges)
- George Tsypin’s use of steel and glass (Aronson)
- The ideograph (Taymor)
- The double image: showing off the mechanics(Taymor)
- Space in space (Svoboda)
- The formal theater (Robert Wilson)
- Anti-illusionistic design (Appia)
- Color projection color recession
- 1.2.3. point perspective
- Complementary colors
- Forced perspective
- light and shadow:
1) specular
2) specular-edge transfer
3) shadow-edge transfer
4) shadow.

- Motivated lighting: Identifying the source
- Elevation Section and Plan
- Ecstatic truth (Herzog)
- Theater of the oppressed (Boal)
- Collaboration
- Ishioka’s creed: revolutionary, original, timeless
- Foreman’s set design (Aronson)

Feel free to add information. :)

Here are the pictures of our first day of the Live Design meetings.































































Pictures from our next session will be posted Tuesday night, enjoy =D.

-Alex

Preliminary Live Design meeting

That went well. :) Basic sequence of events planned out, acted out. Pictures to follow as soon as Alex gets home and uploads them.

New meeting time - TUESDAY 2PM AT JOE'S, AND FROM THERE TO THE QUARRY WHERE WE WILL FURTHER REFINE OUR SEQUENCE OF ACTIONS
(If you follow the path past Joe's and past the stairs that lead to the Merrill bus stop, you'll see signs for the Quarry up and to the left. If not, people around you should be able to give you directions, or just call Boyd.)

WE ARE STILL MEETING ON WEDNESDAY.

We may or may not recruit Mark's girlfriend to help us with lighting (since we're at a disadvantage, being half the size of other groups, and my suggestion of hiring workers from outside the hardware store to help us was summarily vetoed). Her name is Holly, she's nice.

Can Theater and Media Speak the Same Language: Reading Notes

- Since its beginnings, theater has always used technology to dazzle and mystify the audience.
- Since the early-mid twentieth century, video and projections have been used; sometimes as a gimmick, sometimes as a replacement for a backdrop.
- Projections and moving images do not work on stage, they distract the audience, they don’t have the same scenographic vocabulary.
- Theater “tricks” the audience by making the signified the signifier; a human represents another human, a chair represents a chair.
- When an audience sits in a theater, they realize that they are supposed to perceive the stage as what it represents, not what it really is.
- When something like a video is projected on stage, it disrupts the audience’s perception of the stage.
- Another issue is that the audience perceives the stage and actors as part of “here and now.” It’s being performed live, the sets are moving and changing, etc. But when an image is projected, while it still exists in the “here and now” it still also exists in the past. It’s been pre-made, pre-recorded.


To comment on the reading:

I saw a production of Hamlet where the ghost of Hamlet's father was used as a projection of some sort of otherworldly mist, and I thought it worked surprisingly well. The again, the author did say there were exceptions.


-Mark Escobedo

Aronson's Can Theater and Media Speak the Same Language? Notes

- projected scenery, especially film/video, do not work onstage
- projections and images are innately different from the stage, so employing both is simply overwhelming and confusing
- this clash between theater and media involve physiological, psychological, and philosophical reasons
- theater is the only art form to use objects to signify the same object (human = another human, chair = chair, etc)
- we have an intrinsic understanding that we reside in time and space
- this understanding carries over to what is perceived onstage
- projected images derail this sense of time & space producing a separate world on stage
- images, being static, are subject to the angle at which they are viewed (so no single person in the audience sees the same thing)
- photographs while in the present represent something historical, whereas the stage is wholly present and something we can touch
- there is also a spatial dislocation between stage and projected images
- the stage frames each scene much like a painting does
- when a player leaves the stage, our imagination fills in what happened to them
- cinema and projections conflict with the frame onstage and puts into question figure and ground
- images (especially moving ones) cause confusion and dislocation: the projection is seen as the figure and the stage as the ground
- since projections are framed, we perceive them as boundless; the stage, on the other hand, is apparently confined and finite
- moving images also force a competition of focus between it and the actors
- projections have no permanence since it is only light and shadow
- there are cases of contemporary media and theater working together such as the Wooster Group's productions
- as Aristotle warned, spectacle is "the least artistic" aspect of theater

Stevenson runs 7 minutes ahead of the rest of the world

I'm getting sick of College Eight dining hall food. So tonight, my roommate and I went to Stevenson to eat because their dining hall recently opened up after renovations. We got there at 6:58 PM, not knowing that they close at 7 PM (how many people normally eats before 7?). At the door, the workers that swipe the cards say that they are closed. This random guy ahead of us asks the workers what time it was. They say 7:05. The guy looks at his phone and says it’s 6:58. The workers say that his phone clock must be slow. Then, my roommate and I pull out our phones and say that it’s only 6:58. Still, they say that they can’t let us in…

This wouldn’t have been as bad had my roommate and I not gone to Stevenson yesterday night as well only to find out that it was Cowell/Stevenson college night.

Kevin

live design idea

the instructions:
live design: with simple props and simple costumes, the entire group enacts a design that shows visually a transition between two states. total time including setup performance and break down= 15min.


my idea:
we have someone dress up as a bull & its master or owner (whatev) and have the owner lead the bull onto stage. someone comes and feeds the bull and it proceeds to defecate. we then have some other people come and mother fucking devour the fecal matter (nom nom nom).


now, i do not know if that will take up 15m, the idea is open to mother fucking criticism mother fuckers.

ALSO: MEETING TO DISCUSS LIVE DESIGN ON SUNDAY 5/31 (THAT'S THE DAY AFTER SATURDAY AND BEFORE MONDAY) @ THE FIRESIDE LOUNGE WHICH IS SOMEWHERE.

Environmental Design Criticism

I'm pretty confused with the criticism our group received on our environmental design project. We were told that our decorations covered up and took away from the meaning of our structure.

A lot of other groups' designs were mainly supposed to be decorative and making an environmental space different. Groups that made the Spiderweb, the chalk drawings, the birthday bus stop, and others were I think mainly based on making a space look different and getting spectators to feel good, yet not having other meaning behind that. Don't get me wrong, I liked all those designs and thought they were cool. But they were still mainly based on looking cool and decorating a spot.

For our design, we decorated a bridge with natural elements, like the sticks, the rocks, and the ferns. We also had an additional meaning behind it like making the unnatural natural yet unnatural (or whatever it was). And attempting to bring life to our bridge (the ferns), yet ironically killing life (the ferns). And our bridge being there and allowing others to make their own interpretations.

So since other designs were made to basically decorate a spot, we too decorated a spot, and get hammered by criticism. Huh? We not only decorated the spot, but had meaning behind it has well. We had both decorations and meaning, so wouldn't that be better? Had we not had meaning at all so that our decorations had nothing to cover up, would that have been better?

On our stage design, we were told that our first design was the bare minimum, before we changed it and made it better. So basically, we wanted to make sure that we didn't do the minimum, by adding lively decorations like the ferns and the sign and the stick man. And now, we're told we did too much, and the decorations were unnecessary.

Presentation Discussion Order

1. Thought Process
-Location
-Design
2. Sketch and Inspiration
3. Supplies
4. Construction/creation
5. Improvisation
6. Meaning/interpretation
7. Passerby reactions


I tested the powerpoint on a housemate's Mac and it worked so we are good to go for tomorrow.

-Alex

Compare and Contrast

Compare and contrast the two different styles in the video clip. (You'll probably be doing more of one than the other.)

My dream sketch, kinda random.

I LIKE TO CONNECT AND BE MEANINGFUL WITH MY BLOG EVERY NIGHT, DO YOU?

I PERSONALLY ENJOY THE POINT THAT FORMS AT THE TOP OF THE PAGE FROM THE TWO LINES THAT ALMOST JOIN, FORMING THE ROAD; AND I ALSO TAKE JOY FROM THE UNREALISTIC TREE BRANCHES THAT JUT FROM THE LARGE TREE TRUNKS, ALMOST AS IF THEY'RE TRYING TO DANCE.

in other goddamn news, we are meeting tomorrow (that's WEDNESDAY WEDNESDAY WEDNESDAY) at 7pm @ Joe's, as per usual.

Mark's Dream Sketch

-Mark Escobedo

Interview with a Chatbot - Audio Edition

http://people.ucsc.edu/~mescobed/TA10/Interview.mp3

-Mark Escobedo

PC or Mac

Last week, my Gateway laptop died. When I tried to turn it on, it either gave me error messages, sat at the opening "Gateway" screen, or have a blank black screen and did nothing. Since then, I've gotten my computer to start working again. But it was extremely irritating.

I'm a huge supporter of Mac, though I own a PC. I do have an iMac at home though.

Because I am so angry at PCs or at least my crappy Gateway laptop, I took this quiz on Facebook called "Are you a Mac or are you a PC?", just to see what I’d get. And…

You are a Mac person. You like instant functionality and beauty combined. You love the smoothness in a Mac. You would rather pay a little more now than run to the store every month. It means you think for the longterm! So take a bite at the nearest apple!

Yes! I swear, I was gonna go on this HUGE rant if I had gotten PC. Man, I really hate PCs now. Maybe it’s just my crappy Gateway. Actually, no. It’s just PCs in general, but my Gateway is just the lowest of the low.

If I would have gotten PC, here’s what it would have said…

You are a PC person. You want functionality over smooth looks. You love customizations and you would stay away from Macs because they take so many decisions for you! You like to have things your own way even if it may mean putting in a little extra effort. Make your choices at the nearest geek hub!.

Functionality?! HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!! That is HILLARIOUS!!!! WOW! Functionality… HAHA!!!

Most people who love PCs hate Macs and most people who love Macs hate PCs. So in the spirit of randomness on our blog, what do you like better: Macs or PCs? Comment or post something.

Kevin

Dream Sketches

Here are my scene sketches for my dream.

Kevin

If The Other Party Wins

Kinda old because the election is long over, but still funny.

One thing's for sure: the person you disagree with is going to ruin the country.

Meeting Today

Hey, just letting you all know that our environmental design is no longer there and was taken done by someone. (Maybe it was a safety hazard to those bikers.) Whoever took it down, I hope that when they were taking it down, that rock hit him in the head ;). So our meeting today might be shorter than expected, or maybe we should just talk about how we are going to present on Thursday.

Meeting today at Joe's at 2 PM.

Kevin

Random Group Pictures.

There were a lot of random photos taken that I wanted to post just because.





























-Alex

Environmental Design: The unnatural naturally altered in an unnatural, but natural way.

Anyone feel free to comment =D
-Alex


As always, more pictures are here:
http://s616.photobucket.com/albums/tt248/ultima377/?start=all