fuck

I've been such a cry baby bitch as far as writing on here goes for the last bunch of months. I hate it.  I hate feeling that shit like that is all I have to write about.  The Polish Pugilist is done, the first shoot for the Soap Factory videos is done and the next won't be for a couple weeks.  Weisman project is long done.  Anything with Cassie beyond a friendship (hopefully maintained for awhile) is done.  Haven't been psyched talking to the previous source of angst (hearing about fucked up situations and the same topics over and over again gets a bit boring).  No Solid Gold shows coming up.  No art show to create for.  A friendship that got shaken up to fix.  After being very monastic for months had a taste of regular extremely good sex, now I frustratingly want to fuck all the time (hung up on only doing it with the partner for that incredible sex, despite knowing that it probably won't happen any time soon).  No job.  No money to spend frivolously.  So many things fell apart.  Let unhindered emotional waves (triggered somewhat by movies that were not good for an unbalanced psyche) fuck things up twice. Car has been towed or ticketed a bunch and it cost a lot.  Need new clothes and shoes.  A few life things that should have been solved awhile ago remain unsolved.  Quite bummed by dissolving of the RYT/GF situation.  Un-fit.  Anxiety issues.  Crap from past that I was happy to put behind me came back and bit me in the ass.  Smoking waaaaayyyyy to much. Hardcore OD on meds.  I could go on, but that would get into stuff not proper for the public (I learned that lesson). I will end it with; a few weeks ago I had what I can honestly call the worst weekend in my life and ironically it started on what was my first truly terrible Friday the 13th.

Basically all the things that held me up through the summer are finished and my mind is stuck dwelling on all of those instead of the things below that were awesome.  I have no idea what to do.

Good things that have happened in the last year:

-Light work on "Matter of Time" video
-2 big/rad installations at 1st ave
-Art show
-Good times w/ Cassie
-Design work for Gayngs
-Not really any seizures
-Light wall/installation at Weisman
-Light direction for SG Mpls.tv vid
-Lighting/co-direction for Soap Factory Haunt/ Mpls.tv vids
-Realized my friends are better friends than I thought
-Knowledge of my name and work has expanded
-The Polish Pugilist (biggest and best)

Those are a bunch of good things that very few people get to do anything close to, but for some reason the bad overwhelms the good when it comes to my angsty brain.  I am the donkey from Winnie the Pooh.  I didn't think of this reference; it came from a conversation with a very specific person.   I don't like feeling or living this way.

Call me Eeyore (I might start 'Bryant on Bryant' with that line)

shit, why can't Tron just come out and give me something to be excited about

wow

It's amazing how much a good distraction will help you get through a fucked up time in your life.  It's also amazing how once that distraction is gone all the thoughts and feelings that had been held a a slow trickle will turn into a flood.  
Whole bunch of shit came back and poured itself all over me now that the distraction is officially gone.  I thought I had dealt with this shit and gotten over it.  This sucks.  Really sucks.  Really really sucks.   I can't describe it and I wish I didn't have to.  I can't get a break.

I told myself I would never do it, then I told someone that when I said it to them it would be the only time I ever used the term; but here I go again.  FML

changes

The Polish Pugilist is done with it's run.  Really sad actually; it was fucking good and could be fucking huge if it had time.  Beyond that it is sad that I spent two months working really hard with a small group of people to make such a fucking awesome thing.   It mad my summer, kept me sane when the other landmark of this summer kind of shook things off the tree.  A truly amazing time and truly amazing experience.  Jeremy Catterton, Hillary Falk, Jacob Grun, Mike Rylander, Abby Williams, Claire Monesterio, Kristina Perkins, Paula MacDonald, and me.  Ben and the 1419 space. That shit was awesome.  I'm really proud really really proud to have been involved in the project.  One of my proudest moments actually and I think that everybody else involved is incredibly just as proud of their work.   All my stress and thinking and worry and work paid off.  The Polish Pugilist is what made it possible for me to keep it together when some people close to me brought me to a place where I could have lost it (one of those people is partially responsible for my involvement).  Something to focus on and keep my mind in line.  Amazing learning experience; and incredibly rad time.

I'll miss the experience and the people 

Jeremy, thank you for asking me to help you out, I owe you one.

now it's time to figure out what comes next

d

drunk. a bit too much. mission not accomplished

bit of wisdom

if you and 6 people go in the bathroom to get your line on remember that there is a line for the bathroom forming on the other side of the door. so dysen that shit up and get the fuck out; I've got to take a piss

ouch

august sucks.  trouble and stress have been stacking overlapping like roof shingles keeping out the light of ease and happiness.  a few sky lights have helped; but as I move up towards the end of the month I don't really see an end to it.  I am ee-or (sic), the donkey from winnie the pooh; a big smile brings a bigger frown, fuck.  this sucks.   so many cool things, so many shitty things to bring them down.

at least I made peace with some important people.

a good line

"we have such great sex, it would be a waste not to do it"

one more good review of the play I did the lighting/set design for

'Pugilist' a powerful indictment

Blunt and experimental theater piece moves around in old building as it stresses hardships facing new immigrants.

By JOHN TOWNSEND, Special to the Star Tribune

Last update: August 24, 2010 - 4:44 PM

You actually have to sign a waiver to see "The Polish Pugilist," 
because it's being played on three floors of a tatty building that 
looks as if it might have existed at the time the show is set in.

In the show, writer/director Jeremey Catterton exposes the disconnect between the American Dream and blunt realities faced by new immigrants, such as unpaid wages, filthy housing and treacherous working conditions. Drawing from novelist Upton Sinclair's raging 1906 indictment of the meatpacking industry, "The Jungle," and loosely blending the persona of Rocky Balboa, popularized by Sylvester Stallone, in the Rocky films, Catterton shapes a spare and stunning commentary on the exploitation of immigrants and athletes.

By changing Sinclair's Lithuanians to Poles, Catterton sets up a conceit in which bigoted jokes against that group comment cruelly on the narrative of protagonist Jurgis/Rocky, powerfully played by Catterton himself. Delivered in harshly vaudevillian style, Michael Rylander and Jacob Grun diabolically punctuate Catterton's tribulations with sarcastic quips.

Those tribulations are portrayed as the audience is escorted to the building's three floors for this one-hour show's three acts. Extraordinary but simple imagery abounds. Fabric represents a corpse. Dirt symbolizes scatological degradation. 'Red, white, and blue' ironically equals economic royalism.

As abject poverty compels the protagonist to box, a beguiling ensemble of five performs choreographed punching that is almost too close to the audience. Rylander, reminiscent of Apollo Creed, and Catterton, play out a hypnotically stylized boxing match. The 1419 building evokes a haunting ambience of fabled tenements.

John Townsend writes regularly about theater.

over

over isn't the right word, but get over it is right the right thing to say.   I have a better understanding of things and I am less bothered by the events of a week and a half ago.   I'm done being down about it, I'm done being angry about it and I'm done holding a grudge.   Good friends are more important.  I'm finally (more or less) past my interpretation of the situation and into accepting the explanation of the others; they were the ones present for the whole event.   I'm excited to step forward with a new sense of openness and understanding.  stepping forward is a way better feeling that holding onto the past.   it's also hard to hold a grudge over something I have been more than guilty of (I've often said that a specific girl's boyfriend should have kicked my ass multiple times for doing the same thing that I was so bothered about); this was a much bigger and more intense concentrated version of something in the same vein as something I took part in; except instead of me being a relative stranger to this dude, in my case it was a close friend.  Another difference is that he is a fucking retard and I'm just kind of retarded.

and last night was awesome.  got to meet a junkie (on something hard while I was around the dude) who is obsessed with the girl who played a role in the instance.  he plays his guitar and sings really well; but he has a strange obsession with heroin musicians and "the lifestyle" they engaged in.  pretty fucked up.

then I got to kick it with the lady and to finish it off I found that with some excellent help a bank can be filled and emptied by way of multi-tasking.  

another thing

poop was here, now the shit has been wiped away

ick

dammit.  nothing going my way. ups and downs and downs and shits.   I've never meant "alright" as an answer to "how you are doing?" or "how are things?" more than I have in the last week.

cool review of what has caused me so much stress in the last few weeks

the polish pugilist, presented through august 28 at 1419 washington avenue south, minneapolis. for information and tickets ($15-$25), seejeremeycatterton.com

Catterton himself contributes a committed performance in the eponymous role—though one of the many interesting things about The Polish Pugilist is that it doesn't have characters in the conventional sense. The actors play people with names, but they seem to represent archetypes, and their actions are narrated in third person, as though their lives are out of their own control. Developments are declared, then enacted. The characters are suffering the travails faced by millions of immigrants to this country, and the suggestion that they are without agency might seem insulting if it weren't so clearly portrayed as a collective experience. It's not a story about this man and this woman, it's a story about these people, in this place, at this time.

Working with Catterton are four onstage collaborators—plus an ASL interpreter (Paula MacDonald) who joins the action rather than standing in an offstage spotlight. (It's not clear where "offstage" would be, anyway.) As the story of Catterton's beleagured character unfolds, Jacob Grun, Clare Monesterio, Michael Rylander, and Abbie Williams circle around him like lions in a cage, alternately taking characters and narrating the action. They often—Rylander especially, clad in smoking jacket—pause to tell jokes in the hoary dumb-Polack tradition, and at each punchline the actors moan and grimace as if they'd been physically struck. Again, this could feel insulting or didactic, but it's handled deftly and swiftly: there are no pauses meant to make us think about what we've learned before the action cascades onward.

The play begins on the third floor of the dilapidated interior space at 1419 Washington Avenue, a setting that effectively stands in for the dangerously crowded tenements and run-down houses occupied by the characters. As the first act becomes the second and the second becomes the third, the show practically falls down two flights of steps, with Catterton's character defending himself from a series of brutal physical and emotional blows that are enacted with an almost literally in-your-face physicality (get ready to duck). Then, at the play's climax, Catterton faces off against Rylander—especially for those who have seen the charming Rylander in more conventional fare like Bye Bye Liver and The Saved By the Bell Show, it's worth the price of admission just to see him come bouncing out in an Apollo-Creed-style American flag cape—on a boxing ring of holograms. (I won't even try to explain how that works.) The lighting by Bryant Locher and the costumes by Hilary Falk are all the more effective for their relative minimalism.

In Lamb Lays With Lion vs. Katie Mitchell's The Seagull, Catterton separated the narrative and the emotion of Chekhov's play like oil and water, enacting them side-by-side on the same stage. The concluding act of The Polish Pugilist plays like Jeremey Catterton vs. Sylvester Stallone's Rocky, but with the two interpretations wrapped around one another. Catterton and Rylander go at each other with sweat, blood, and bile—in a clever and well-executed maneuver, the blood is applied by their trainers when the combatants take their respective corners—but they fight at odd angles, under swinging lamps, and to the soundtrack of crashing dance rock accompanied by Grun's live guitar. It's a dazzling spectacle, one of the most powerful things I've seen on stage (er, "on stage") all year—and it's a perfectly-judged conclusion to what's come before. It goes on for a long time, which underlines the point: when you're in the circumstances in which Catterton's character finds himself, there's nothing to do but fight, and fight. And fight. And fight.

If, like me, you're a fan of Catterton and the experimental methods he employs, you don't need to be convinced to see The Polish Pugilist. For the rest of you, this show answers the question, "What can avant-garde postdramatic theater do for me?" It can do this, and you should see it while you have the chance.

she made me feel the happiest I had felt in so long, now she has made me hurt more than I have ever felt in my whole life.   I am so cold and so empty feeling.   I've never felt like I do right now; I don't have the words for it.  the floor fell out from beneath me and I had a noose made out of betrayal and lies; emotion and faith in the goodness of people are no longer part of my life.  I got what I karmically deserve, I just never would have ever thought this is how it would happen.  I'm officially broken, cracked right down the middle and only entropy is thing coming out.  I don't know what to say; I walked into one of my best friends going at it with the girl who had called herself my girlfriend the day before; 10 minutes before it happened he told me that she had been hitting on him all night and that I had nothing to worry about and that he had my back and wouldn't let anything like that happen. hurt isn't the right word neither is betrayal.  goodbye for now I don't know what else to do

I knew it

man, Reality Bites.  there is significance to that movie that I won't share.  something I wrote on here a while ago fucked things up for me recently.  I hate the person who was the topic of the post that knocked things off the rails; she ruined my life.  the phone conversation I just had was a thing.  wow, talk about getting caught off guard.  I made a few dumb decisions and reality bit me in the ass for it


It took 31 years for it to happen, but I just had a true Friday the 13th. started alright, got a bit worse, went south, sucked, then ended with an ether scene bang

irony

very often that which gets me up brings me down.  I'm just an e-oar (I don't know how to spell the name right, but I imagine you all know who I'm talking about) jealous of all the tiggers bouncing around me.

loose change

Has anyone ever seen THX1138?   I feel a bit like I'm in the room with all white non-walls; I keep trying to look and go different directions in an effort to escape, but it hasn't worked yet.  I keep trying to move forward, a few times I even thought I saw a way out; but things just don't change and there isn't an exit in sight.   This shit is really getting to me; bringing me down, shaking me up.   It's so fucking hot and humid right now; I'm not made for this shit and it's not helping at all.

I'm done with all this summer business; I want the fans to be off, I want to wear a jacket, I want to wear pants comfortably, I want to use a blanket, I don't want to sweat while sitting; a source of smiles did find me and I haven't smiled that broadly in a long time; but now it feels like I need to schedule appointments (that's being hard on her and isn't entirely true).  I'm just a bummed out dude getting dragged down by the things that should be making me happy.  

carry

Got a bit carried away as far as pounding out posts goes.  that last one was pretty intense.   now I'm awake after not as much sleep as I would have liked to get to be ready for today.   I have a lot of work to do and I was already planning to skip out on some of it.  whatever, shit is stupid and I'm already a few days behind (shocking, I'm usually so on top of things).   Polish Pugilist lighting design, I'm going to be so mad if I have to do the tech work for the performances; fucking bullshit.

vows

   My brother is Matt, and while there are times we've wanted to kill each other, he is fucking awesome and I'd die for him.  I've got a friend named Matthew and he is a rad mother fucker I'd probably take a bullet for too.  Now there is a new Matt on my mind.
   This colon dweller is worse than the ground underneath a piece of yellow dog shit.  I will break my vow to not hit anybody in order to hurt this asshole.  I'd like to break his fucking legs and arms; some brass knuckles for his face would be nice.  I really don't care if by the end of things I've gotten my ass kicked as long as I hurt him in the process.  I can't say why this dixie cup full of stale bile deserves this, but if it were up to me I would say why.  If I did there would be an army behind me as I broke him.  This guy is a true piece of shit, as I was being told about this guy I felt rage boiling inside me.
   After I shattered my knuckle fighting with my brother I vowed to myself that I was done with hitting things and that if I were to hit someone they would absolutely deserve it.  Now I vow that he will be the next person I punch in the face (unless some asshole really earns the honor, but it will be pretty hard for that to happen).
   There are some people you never hit and he did that and more to one who is now close to me.  It happened before I met her, but with the way I feel about that person it is as if he did it yesterday.  If you can't tell this is something that has me very upset. I won't forget what he did and if it is tomorrow or a year or more I vow I WILL hit this guy (even if it turns out like the fight at the end of Dazed and Confused).

what?

While on a long walk intended to take my mind off the situation I realized a flaw in a bit of logic that was explained to me recently.  Makes me think about previous experiences involving a similar story.  I really don't know what's up, doubt and skepticism suck.

The walk was nice though
 

song of today

I'm kind of done with this summer, so I wish I had heard this a few months ago; but she's hot and the song is cool so who cares

song of today

A bit different, but pretty cool

song of today

the best cover I've heard in a little bit

x-ray vision

I wish I would have put on a lead vest.  I thought I was going to get an MRI so I left all my metal in the car.   I was prepared for some heavy magnetics, but instead I got shot with a big dose of radiation.  As the x-rays are developing I'm unsure about what I'm seeing as things become more transparent.  I shouldn't have left the armor at home.  I might be getting poisoned by the radiation, but until I feel sick I'll just keep hanging out.

On the other hand I might be laying back in an MRI tunnel imagining things.

 (this is why you don't write things after a certain hour and after passing a certain level of intoxication; the shit just doesn't make much sense)

this movie shaped my life

SETI

I just found out that the seti people received a cosmic signal, but due to the earth's rotation it only comes in once a day.  Sucks for them, the cosmic signal rocks some sweet jams.  

greatest fight scene from greatest movie ever

Jamiroquai song

I was recently found by a cosmic girl.  Jay K knew what he was talking about when he wrote that song.   "She laser beamed me with her cosmic eyes". Girl's got me writing cheesy stuff like this, I guess that's what happens when you get happy and good things start happening the same time I started hanging with the RYT.  She's awesome; straight up no problem with PDA level awesome.  I'm a lucky dude