drfreex.com

Somehow, even though the amount of attention I have paid to this blog over the years would, were it a child and I a parent, have sent me to jail for abandonment, I have made over 200 posts. Somehow.  I know this because I am going through each and every one, repairing links and slapping one of these new-fangled category thingamabobs on ’em. Even nuked a couple of them because they were only there to present YouTube clips, and the forces of Satan had long since removed said clip.

Today was the first paycheck in some time that was not promised in its entirety to the mortgage company; it was instead  delivered kicking and screaming into the gaping maw of Verizon, in the hopes of getting my Internet service back before the long weekend. Of course, Things Do Not Work That Way, so it will be Tuesday at the earliest before I can do anything like, you know, blog from the comfort of my home.

Oh yeah, says the reader who has been with us for a while, like that’s going to happen. Well, it could! You big meanies!

This means, at least, I’ll have more enforced reading time, which is a good thing. In all this reviewing and tweaking I’ve run across my original post in which I thought it was a good idea to finally read the entire run of Cerebus, since that sneaky Dave Sim had finished its 300 issue run while I wasn’t looking. I’ve been muttering about that 140 characters at a time on Twitter, but that of course is the sort of thing which fills reams of digital paper and drives people crazy who come here to hear me snark about bad movies .

Speaking of which: we finally have another bad movie night coming up this Sunday. I’ll be livetweeting occasionally, so follow me and avoid the rush. Of course, any plans to embloggen it Memorial Day have now been stunned with a hammer and dragged onto the kill floor, but it might still happen in the usual slow, torturous way.

Now that I’ve gotten the bad movie folks excited, back to comics. I’ve now read 200 of the 300 issues of Cerebus. Some went swimmingly, some of it was like hacking your way through gelatin with a paper machete. We’ll talk. But while I wait to be able to buy the last two books, I’ve set my wandering gaze in other directions, and am now reading the One Volume Edition of Jeff Smith’s Bone. I’d read… well, quite a bit of it in periodical form, before I had to give it up in one of my periodic belt-tightenings. Turns out I had gotten nearly to the halfway mark, and MAN, am I loving it.

The fact that the One Volume Edition could be used as a murder weapon is mere icing upon the cake. It will be finished over the weekend, and then I will be very, very sad.

Such is the power of good writing, and yes dammit, I am talking about a comic book.

May 28, 2010
Categories: Mindless Blather . . Author: drfreex . Comments: Leave a comment

I’ve migrated all the old Blogger files, which turned out to be painless… Until I started looking at the posts.

A little more experience would helped, I’m sure. But some of the YouTube embeds have just gone away. I’m coding them back in by hand, but this is a long process.

So don’t read back too far, ‘kay?

LATER: And I should also note that I wrote and submitted that entry on the Crackberry last night, but only found this morning that it hadn’t published. Yeah, I’d say I still have a few things to learn.

May 26, 2010
Categories: Mindless Blather . . Author: drfreex . Comments: Leave a comment

Yes, the peer pressure was starting to hurt my eardrums, Yes, the old, Blogger version is gone, the Comments being used for (I romantically assume) nefarious purposes by international provocateurs. Will I do any better at keeping this one updated? We’ll see.

I still have all the old blog entries in an .xml file. Maybe I’ll eventually figure out how to archive them here. We’ll see. I like new toys. That will help.

May 25, 2010
Categories: Mindless Blather . . Author: drfreex . Comments: 2 Comments

Spotted this over on The Daily Dish, where Andrew Sullivan finds them a bit scary. Me, I find them magical and impressive:

January 13, 2009
Categories: Mindless Blather . . Author: drfreex . Comments: 2 Comments

The commute to the theater turned out to be a 71 mile round trip, which I began to make six days out of seven. One snag is that it was only 71 miles if I used a toll road, which totaled nine bucks per day in tolls. Texas Rep did provide a weekly travel stipend, which almost took care of the tolls.

But here’s the other thing which was amazing about the Texas Rep: in stark contrast to other small pro theaters I’ve worked with in the area, I was paid for the rehearsals, as well as for the performances. All told, with tolls and rising gasoline prices, I probably broke even – and when you’re playing Van Helsing, breaking even is certainly good enough.

Though grueling – leaving the Hated Job to go straight to rehearsal or performance for over a month – the overall experience of Dracula was so overwhelmingly positive, I would love to work there again as soon as possible… or at least once I was was feeling halfway rested again.

The professionalism on display at the Texas Rep was impressive. I was likely the oldest member of a young cast – I passed the half-century mark during final dress – and I never had the experience (which I’ve had so many times) of looking at one of my fellow actors and thinking, “What the hell is that person doing on stage?”

Actually, the actor playing Renfield, Jeff Lane, lags only a few years behind me. He, along with the director, Steven Fenley, were members with me in the Main Street Theater company back in the late 80s, early 90s. And Jeff was one of the ill-fated actors in a move called Forever Evil. And yet, with over 20 years of knowing each other, we had never acted in a show together.

November 27, 2007
Categories: Mindless Blather . . Author: drfreex . Comments: Leave a comment

So there I was in September; things were fairly on-track for once. I had actually started updating The Bad Movie Report (two months in a row – woo!), kept up 50 Foot DVD, was entering into a new writing contract for a video game, so naturally, something had to come along and disrupt things.

In this case, it was a phone call one Saturday afternoon, from a fellow named Steve Fenley. I had worked in the Main Street Theater company with Steve back in the 90s, and I knew he had started a new theater in Northwest Houston. Now, I had pretty much absented myself from the stage for several years, albeit filling in at the eleventh hour for an old friend who’d had to fire an actor, and web project that I am assured will see the light of day “soon” – but I had, more or less, retired myself. Though I pondered returning, off and on.

The phone call concerned their upcoming production of Dracula, for which they looking for someone old enough and possessing – this is Steve’s wording – the gravitas to pull off the role.

Now, I had been contacted well over a year before by the same theater for a peach of a role in The Fantasticks; I had begged off citing the distance I’d have to commute each day.

This time they got smarter. They offered me Van Helsing.

Every actor has a list of roles they want to play. Van Helsing has been high on my list for… well, ever. So long that back when I was in college in the late ’70s, and the drama department produced the Hamilton Deane version, I was crestfallen when the director decided Van Helsing should be played by a woman.

Texas Rep was doing a newer stage version, one written by Steven Dietz, who is, according to sources, the “most produced playwright in America”. Given I’ve only done three shows this year, and two were by Dietz, I believe this might actually be correct.

So, I waited a few seconds, to pretend to be thinking about it, and said “Yes.”

More later. For now I inflict upon you a photo of Van Helsing’s opening scene, in which he reads the letter from Dr. Seward begging him to come to London to treat Lucy Westenra, a letter containing phrases such as “You have an absolutely open mind, an iron nerve, a temper of ice, an indomitable resolution, and the kindest and noblest heart that beats. These things provide the equipment for the noble work which you are doing for the good of mankind.” The photo is taken as Van Helsing turns to audience and says, “I, for one, would love to meet the man young Dr. Seward describes.”

—————-
Now playing: Ray Wylie Hubbard – Screw You, We’re from Texas
via FoxyTunes

November 18, 2007
Categories: Mindless Blather . . Author: drfreex . Comments: 7 Comments

Nothing to relate. I yet live, although my aged computer chair attempted to murder me by actually snapping in twain. I currently sit in a wooden dining room chair while playing solitaire – excuse me, while I’m working – and I am having Andrew Borntreger/New Orleans Worst Film Festival flashbacks: “I CAN’T….FEEL… MY ASS!!!!!”

Still awaiting that wondrous first writing check which will reinstate my broadband and buy a new, more ass-friendly chair. These things are important.

August 13, 2007
Categories: Mindless Blather . . Author: drfreex . Comments: 2 Comments

…is pretty boring. And stupid-making. Not being able to Google up any esoteric bit of knowledge I require is… frustrating, to say the least. I have been able to fall back upon my antique paper Interweb, ie, my reference shelf, about some things, but by and large… eh. Guess I didn’t need to know it that badly.

I’ve started upon a new writing gig, but this one won’t be gobbling up two years of my life, which is a good thing, but then, it won’t be paying me for two years of my life, which is a bad thing. A little acting thing I’ve been working on will come to fruition next week, after which I’ll have more time to not surf the Web.

In short, it’s like a lot of points in my life: work rushes in to fill a vacuum. And if it’s not work, it’s a solitaire game called German Patience, which, I assure you, is the work of the devil.

August 2, 2007
Categories: Mindless Blather . . Author: drfreex . Comments: Leave a comment

From Wired News: Looks like the draconian royalty rates for Internet radio stations is being rethought.

July 12, 2007
Categories: Mindless Blather . . Author: drfreex . Comments: Leave a comment